New traders - SPAM or no SPAM, punklesam is absolutely right. It is pretty widely accepted that most people who come to trading are forced out due to losses. Or at least not having made the gains they thought they would, which is not the same thing. The common thread though is psychology.
The market does not do the unexpected 90% of the time. And certainly not with such force as to instantly wipe out the traders who were on the wrong side of the move. So the problem is not the market.
The problem is mostly mental, most novices have unrealistic expectations or lack the mental fortitude to develop, test and stick with a systematic method, or are unprepared for losses, or have an unconscious block.
The unconscious blocks can be the worst and most difficult to identify and confront. Many of us are brought up with attitudes to hard work, honest effort, gainful employment, money, job success, earned / unearned income and all that baggage which are incompatible with successful trading. So traders sometimes sabotage their own efforts due to some kind of guilt / mental mismatch between what they want and how they are getting it. These inner conflicts can be deep and hard to spotlight.
As an example, we will often hear, as a term of praise or professional recognition, the phrase 'full-time trader'. As if that were a good thing! But really, which is better, being a successful 30-minute a day trader or being an exactly equally successful, 10-hour a day trader? For the same money, surely, the less time you put in to earn it the better? But in reality, we can sometimes be so bound by the self-recognition that comes from a job / profession that we see trading as a job-substitute. Trading is an activity to generate money, end of story. If you need to use it as a means to re-define yourself, whether as a market player or trader or hot-shot gambler or entrepreneur or whatever, you are trading outside the true reality. You might just as well make up charts out of your head.
Every new trader should indeed read Mark Douglas as punklesam recommends.
