Is ‘Losing Trader’ a Fair Label?

If you are not making money it’s logical to label yourself as a ‘losing trader’. Maybe you don’t say it out loud, but internally it’s there… After all, if you are red, you can’t claim to be winning, so it must be losing.

Right? Not so fast cowboy.

Think of any business or endeavour. Is a new business ever profitable from day one? Hardly any.

• It took Jeff Bezos years to make Amazon profitable.

• It probably took your favourite local restaurant a long time before they started getting the formula right.

Taking an immediate snapshot of your P&L and making a claim about your trading skill level makes no sense in the early days.

Whilst you are in developing trader mode you should expect to be red. It’s the game, and that’s okay at the beginning. You need to learn, make mistakes, adjust, grow, and develop new skills.

Once you turn the corner and stick in some green quarters, then you can start using P&L as a performance metric. Not before.

In my latest podcast, I talk through you and I starting a hypothetical e-commerce business. How we would drive it to profitability and how that has uncanny parallels to the trading world. Give it a listen…