Stole this off the futures thread - Idiot way of making money!:
Lets talk about trading a little bit. Really to be successful, it is not so much the trading, as the not trading that is important. Not trading is a position also. All you really need to be successful is just one trick, one pattern, one way of taking a piece of a trend to be successful. If that occurs once a month, that is fine. If you make 6% a month off that single trade of your account size and repeat it 12 months a year, that is a 72% gross profit for the year. Are you making 72% a year?
What kills people is experimenting and gambling. All you really need is one trick, or pattern that you know is repeatable and successful and just repeat that no brainer, over and over and over again and you will be in the top 5% of the money making traders. What separates the successful 5% of traders from the losers is that the losers are too intelligent, too smart. They are always trying something new. Now if you restricted your experimenting and learning to paper trading, you would get the advantage of the adrenaline gamblers rush to satisfy your greedy lust and still make money. If you have many losing trades then your are not doing it right.
I better qualify this for those that rightly say when you are handling millions the trade size is different and thus the operation. I wouldn't know about that as my accounts are well under a million. I'm basically talking to novice traders, the learners. You need to a system of confidence in one way that wins much of the time and in the worst case scenario, you know instantly when it doesn't work and will take the loss and make it quick.
The secret then, once you get such a method in making lots more money is account size and piling on the contracts, all you can afford, when you have a repeating no-braining trade pattern or trick. It is the boring way. Not the excitement of trading 25 markets in and out about 5 times a day. But that is what trading successfully really is.
It is just methodical and boring. It also requires patience and the ability to watch the market go by, without the surges of greed and anticipation of how much you could have made today if you had done so and so. Letting the market go by some of the time is what successful trading is about. Piling on contracts, all you can afford when the high probability trade exists, the pattern that rarely misses or only very rarely is the other half of the trick. The rest of the time, go sail a boat, build an airplane, or keep a mistress.
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