a number of years ago. One answer that I gave surprised them. They
asked me what my biggest problem as a trader was.
I told them boredom!
They were shocked; nobody had ever suggested that. Everybody else
thought that trading was exciting.
In the mid-1990s I had the opportunity to train some traders from a
Korean bank. I had six traders for six months, then a second group of six
traders for six months, and a final group of six traders for six months. For
the first group, I brought in guest lecturers to give the students a strong
grounding in all aspects of trading. One guest lecturer was a very experienced
trader using Elliott Wave analysis. For those of you who are not
familiar with Elliott Wave, the basic concept is that the market moves in a
five-wave pattern with, in a bullish configuration, the first, third, and fifth
waves going up and the second and fourth waves declining. The third wave
is the biggest and most powerful wave of them all. So the Holy Grail for
Elliotticians is to try to buy the bottom of the second wave looking to ride
the huge third wave up.
I let my guest lecturer do his lecture with my students and came back
into the room after his lecture. I asked a series of pointed questions to make
sure that the students had gotten a good idea of Elliott Wave. At one point,
I asked him if he was a profitable trader. Imagine my surprise and shock
when he said that he wasn’t. Further, he said that he was never really a
profitable trader. I was partially shocked because I thought that he had
been profitable all these years that I had known him.
But then he burst out, “Well, at least what I’m doing isn’t boring like
the way Courtney trades!”
Turns out that he loved the feeling of catching that Wave Two dip and
watching the Wave Three bull move. Problem was that he couldn’t do that
very often and was a losing trader.
I plead guilty to the fact that following the ideas in this book is not
exciting. I’ll go farther and say that most of you will find my way of trading
boring. I make no excuses. I want trading to be boring, but profitable.
I want trading to be something you do for 15 minutes a day and then go on
with your life.
If trading is exciting, then you are likely to get excited, and getting
excited is usually a recipe for losing money. Think of the casino owner.
Does he get excited when you sit down at the blackjack table? No, he is
bored. He already knows the outcome of the exercise. Contrast this with
the gambler. The gambler is there to get excited. Gamblers know that they
are likely to lose money but they are there to get excited. They have a
chance of winning and the process of gambling is exciting. But who wins?
The guy who is bored or the guy who is excited?
Boredom is one of my personal issues with trading. Here is how I have
overcome it.
One advantage that I have is that I am a scientific person. So what
I have done is created a structure that turns my boredom into increasing
profits. What I do is to take a technique that I am using and then try to
create an enhancement to it. Let’s say that I take channel breakouts and
then come up with an enhancement that says that I will only take trades
in months with blue moons. I then turn on my scientific brain. I now have
a control method, channel breakouts, and an experimental method, Blue
Moon Channel Breakouts.
I now put on both trades from both methods. I flawlessly execute both
methods. I am excited every day to see which method is “winning” the
battle. Which method will be more profitable and/or has less risk. I keep
this comparison up until I have a fair sample of trades. I will look for at
least 30 trades. This might take six months or more to get a good sample of
trades of both methods. I find this comparison trading to be very interesting.
It is certainly not boring to me.
And guess what? I actually constantly find improvements in my
methods using this technique. I beat my boredom and make more
money!
Look, boredom is a problem. But it is a problem for only 15 minutes a
day or you can even use it as the impetus to make more money like I do!
I think boredom comes partially as a result of discipline. It takes discipline
to execute flawlessly. It is boring to be disciplined. I’ve had students
tell me that they wanted to be creative traders. Great! Unfortunately, it is
almost impossible to be profitable and creative at the same time.
Source: How to Make a Living Trading Foreign Exchange: A Guaranteed Income for Life
