George Soros.
LOL !
But yup, it's true.
To be honest, before he became famous, I never ever even thought that trading could be a way to make consistent money, let alone allow one to become very successful.
If I ever thought about trading at all I suppose I put it on a level with gambling: entertaining if one was so inclined, but not best suited to generating value added.
Then, out of the blue, Mr. Soros makes a bet against the pound, and makes a cool Billion in a very short time.
Newspapers around the world were full of his amazing feat, and to me that was a wake-up call that the professional world of investing isn't just inhabited by underperforming mutual funds, that instead there were people out there who had been earning superb money with pretty good consistency over decades.
What most particularly attracted me was that here is somebody making incredible money, yet trading was primarily a means to an end to him, a means to make money to finance his causes, his main ambition was putting the enormous fortune he was regularly earning to a very good cause, in his case spreading democracy around Eastern Europe where he came from.
I found that was absolutely fantastic, what an amazing, blessed life, getting rich beyond belief, and doing lots of good with that.
That got me thinking, and with admittedly lots of hubris I decided that if there are others out there succeeding consistently at trading that that means most importantly of all that it is generally possible, and, secondly, when something is generally possible, that I would do everything in my power to succeed at that as well.
Took me some 8 years after Soros' famous feat, I finished my studies and graduated with a Masters in Politics first, did what I'd also always wanted to do, work for myself, accordingly went on to take my first entrepreneurial steps, eventually received an offer and sold out, wasn't a fortune but enough for a starting stake, so then I decided that from that point onwards it would be trading, and I just jumped in.
Read everything I could from people who had actually made their bundle from trading, not from writing about trading...
met lots of other traders from one Frankfurt forum particularly where many professionals and newbies like me etc met at the time that has since unfortunately dried up as the guy who started that couldn't be bothered any more at some point (he was a trader too)...
anyway, visited lots of traders at home or in their offices to see their setups and what they do...
discovered that there is a very strong correlation between the KISS crowd who believe that markets are nothing more than the sum of their participants who are all doing their own thing in their own way and own time frame, meaning net profitable trading is just a numbers game, that crowd were generally rather flush with money to spend around...
and on the other hand the oooh la la life is very complex and markets even more so crowd who believed that success in markets is down to cracking a secret system hiding behind an elusive holy grail that somehow manages to conduct all market participants in a mysterious way with a magical wand, that crowd had lots of theories about everything and it's cousins but unfortunately decidedly less money to go around...
I had always been a fan of Ockhams razor, who quite rightly observed that all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.
All other things in trading seemed decidely equal, so KISS it was.
To be honest, that notwithstanding, I must admit that it still took me pretty long before I turned the corner from net loser to net winner, but with dogged determination I never let go of the objective of making it.
Think that is one of the main driving elements of success anyway, not superior brains or or a superior business model (Apple vs Microsoft anyone) or anything, no, while having those won't harm you of greater success relevance is perseverance, falling off the horse a lot just like everybody else, but not being afraid of re-experiencing failure, and just getting right back on again, just never letting go of what one wants.
And, to be equally honest, it was never the knowing what needs to be done that was the problem.
It was the actually doing it.
I suppose I really only turned the corner when I learned to totally let go of the individual trade as completely inconsequential in the big scheme of things, once I learned to totally accept that losing is fine, it's just a cost of doing business as a trader, when I learned to simply play out my edge the way it is supposed to be played out, not being upset by losses, and, equally important, not getting overly enthusiastic of winning trades.
I only made it, in short, once I learned to let go.
Wu Wei...
Doing without doing.
