3 Biggest Developing Trader Mistakes

And How You Can Avoid Them

These are the three biggest mistakes I’ve made in my trading journey.

And I see these appear time and time again in developing traders too.

Here they are…

Trading too much size too soon

You’ve to earn the right to trade size.

Build a robust strategy, recover from drawdowns, go through good spells, bad spells, and different market conditions.

Then you can dial things up.

But never forget it doesn’t matter how good you are, you will always have losing trades.

Never put yourself in a position where a few losing trades do massive damage to your account because you were sized too big.

Not dealing with poor discipline sooner

I do rant about this I know… Probably because it whacked me hard in my early days.

I see it in developing traders too. Focused on technical patterns, strategies, and setups. But not working on discipline and mindset.

You need to have your psychology dialled in before you even consider working on strategy.

After all, you could be given a highly profitable strategy, but if you can’t stick to it, or occasionally take trades on a whim the results won’t be there.

I always suggest if there are any chinks in your discipline armour then drop everything else and repair those.

Make it a priority.

Not having defined strategies

I’m all for a discretionary trader using intuition and feel to trade with, but they should be within certain boundaries. Some structure and system to operate within.

You may like trading counter-trend but we both know that if you try and trade counter-trend all the time, you’ll get run over.

There’s a time and a place for trying to spot the turn and focusing your energy on the most likely times for that turn is a much better approach.

Size, discipline, strategy.

Focus on those three and you’re in with a shot…