The Road to Successful Trading

What is a Successful Trader? 
 
“Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you 
believe you were meant to be”- George Sheenan  
The Caribbean water is crystal clear and inviting as you sail on toward Tortola. Your cell phone 
rings and it’s your broker in New York. You listen intently and then say “sell and transfer the funds 
to my commodities account”. You disconnect and do a feeble fist pump and mutter, “cha ching”.
You are in the waiting area at JFK. Your flight to Hawaii leaves in an hour. As you don’t want to be 
disturbed, you re-check today’s positions and stops and close the laptop. You’re taking your family 
on a winter escape to paradise. No clients to worry about. No office politics. Just you and your 
laptop have made it all possible. You look at the Armani crowd and remember what it was like 
before you were able to work in your jogging suit. “No risk….no reward”, you say to yourself. 
You are up in your “command center” as you and your spouse jokingly call it. You hear your 
children and husband getting the kids ready for school. He lives the buttoned down life and you are 
still in your robe. You’ve been up before the markets open and are in the midst of planning today’s 
trades. Yesterday wasn’t a fun experience; you didn’t make your daily goal and your win-loss was 
upside down. You try not to think about it prefer to focus on setting up for today’s trading. You 
come down from the command center to say goodbye to hubby and the kids; your mind is still 
focused on the three trades you plan to make as soon as the entry points presents themselves. Your 
husband starts to say something and you hold up your hand to stop him. “Don’t say a god damned 
thing, you know the rules.” He smiles and herds the kids to the car. With coffee in hand, you bless 
the skills you have acquired but curse the loneliness of the isolation. But there is no other way you 
have the possibility to make the kind of money you can earn by trading and your husband makes 
enough to pay the bills.
But both you and your husband have a dream of moving out of the city and out of the rat race. You 
both want a better home and are able to send your kids to the best schools possible. As h 
withholding and social security taxes are sucked right out of your husband’s paycheck, 
accumulating wealth is almost impossible. but becoming a successful trader may be the only way to 
reach those dreams and ambitions. Up until now, you have been able to actually make fairly steady 
profits in your trading accounts and you feel that after three years of full time day trading , you 
seem to have what it takes to make a go of it. But the pressure and isolation can become intense. 
Which one of these scenarios is a more realistic picture of a “successful trader”?
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Success is defined by the achievement of pre-established goals. The key to becoming a successful 
trader is identifying, quantifying, strategizing, implementing, tracking, analyzing, learning and 

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growing as a conscious person. You see, there is no such thing as “easy money”. Let’s get this 
upfront right now, trading is not easy and not for just anybody.
How many people do you know who have an idea of what they want out of life? How many people 
do you know who understand what makes them happy and what fulfils their needs? Probably not 
many and this is where becoming a successful trader begins…..understanding yourself. You define 
what success means to you. If you don’t know what that is, how can you reach it? In this book, we 
will devote a lot of discussion to help you define yourself, your goals and how you plan to reach 
them. Indeed, this process lies at the heart of building a trading plan for success. 
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