Introduction
There’s one question: „How long did it take before you started being successful at trading?“
And for that one I don’t have a nice clean answer like „two years and 17 days“. Because trading is a process. And a process doesn’t have a sharp line where an unsuccessful trader becomes a successful one. It’s not like passing an exam at school - either we passed or we didn’t. In trading it’s more that we gradually realize that today we’re a little better than we were a month ago. And a year from now we realize we’ve long been doing things we couldn’t do a year ago.
The problem is, many people come into trading with the exact opposite expectation. They want results fast. They want to know „which course should I buy so that I can quit my job in six months.“ They’re looking for a shortcut. And the internet, social media and advertising only reinforce this expectation.
Trading isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. Or rather, it’s not even a marathon - it’s a lifelong discipline we have to take on, and one that will keep teaching us something the whole time.
To illustrate this as clearly as possible, I’ll use a parallel most of us know from our own lives - learning a musical instrument or a foreign language.
Imagine We Want to Learn the Guitar
I still remember buying my first guitar when I was 18. Back then there was no YouTube full of lessons like today. I bought a few books, searched the internet for tutorials, and started learning the basics. First came the simple chords. My fingers hurt like crazy, and every chord change felt painfully slow.
After a few months I could finally play a handful of simple songs. A few months later I was brave enough to play around a campfire with friends. Over time things started to flow more naturally. I could hear the progress, feel the improvement, and I was genuinely proud of how far I had come.
But then comes the real question.
At what point would I have dared to step onto a stage and perform in front of an audience? At what point would I have confidently called myself a guitarist? And at what point could I realistically expect to make a living from it?
Could it eventually happen? Maybe. But certainly not after six months. And very likely not even after two years.
Now imagine the same approach applied to trading. Someone opens an account, reads a few articles, watches a few videos, makes a few trades on demo - and after six months already thinks they can size up to full and trade for a living. Some are even handing in their resignation letter at work.
That’s the equivalent of picking up a guitar, practicing for six months, and then walking onto a stage in front of a packed concert hall expecting people to buy tickets to hear us play.
The market is the harshest concert hall there is. And unlike a concert, where in the worst case they boo us and we leave - the market takes our money. Literally.
Three Layers of the Process
When I look at my own path, and at the paths of the traders I’ve met, I see that the process of becoming a successful trader has three layers. We can’t skip any of them.
1. Patience - It Takes Years, Not Months
This is the hardest thing for most people to accept. Because we live in an era where we can order food in 20 minutes, watch a film with one click, learn anything about anything in ten minutes on YouTube.
But skills (once again skills not knowledge) can’t be ordered. Skills need time. And trading is a skill like any other.
Back to music. There’s a fairly well-known „ten thousand hours“ rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell - to become world-class at anything, we need roughly ten thousand hours of deliberate practice. Whether we’re talking about musicians, chess players, or athletes.
The rule is, of course, a simplification and not entirely accurate - but its core is right. Big things take a long time.
If we translate that to trading - even if we dedicated full working time, 40 hours a week to trading, we reach „ten thousand hours“ in five years. And most people give trading a few hours a day on top of a job, so the realistic horizon is even longer.
And I don’t say this to discourage anyone or to scare anyone off. Even though I jumped into all of my projects headfirst and enthusiastic, not really knowing what was waiting for me - after years of work, when I looked back at how much time, determination and effort the whole thing actually required, I’ve more than once wondered whether I’d have the strength to go through it all over again.
But the good news is that we will see results along the way - if we really commit to it. And even within a much shorter time frame.
So this doesn’t mean we’ll just be losing for five years. We gradually improve, gradually start being profitable, gradually become more consistent. But expecting professional-level results after six months is just as naive as expecting to be giving concerts after six months of guitar.
Patience, by the way, isn’t just about waiting. It’s about trusting the process even when results aren’t showing up the way we wanted. That every next week in front of the charts has meaning, even when the account isn’t printing rockets. That every book we read, every trade we journal, every mistake we analyze pushes us forward by a tiny bit. What looks like slow progress today is actually a quiet construction of the foundations we’ll later build everything else on.
2. Gradual Improvement Through Mistakes and Iterations
The second layer is about how we actually improve. And here comes the truth a lot of people don’t want to hear: we improve mainly through mistakes.
When we’re learning a foreign language, we spend the first months making mistakes in every other sentence. Wrong cases, wrong tenses, wrong prepositions. But gradually those mistakes get fewer. And not only because someone explained the grammar to us - mainly because we made the same mistake a hundred times and gradually figured out why and when it doesn’t fit.
In trading it’s exactly the same. We make a mistake - let’s say we move our stop-loss because „the market will surely come back“. And the market doesn’t come back. We lose. It hurts. But we learn from it. If we’re humble enough to name that mistake and understand why it happened, we’re less likely to do it next time. And even less the time after. Until one day we simply don’t do it anymore.
This is why a trading journal makes such enormous sense. Not for the statistics (our broker statement is enough for that), but so we can later go back and read what we were thinking at the time, why we opened the trade and why we closed it. With hindsight we’ll see patterns we missed in the moment.
But be careful - a mistake only has value if we recognize it as a mistake. If we made an impulsive entry that randomly ended in profit, we may pat ourselves on the back and do it again. And again. Until the tenth or twentieth time, the market punishes us properly. And then we’ll think „we’re unlucky.“ But it wasn’t about luck.
The mistake was there from the start - we just didn’t see it, because it was masked by profit.
That’s why it’s not enough to review our losing trades. We also have to review our winning trades - and ask ourselves whether we earned them properly or by accident. Sometimes the most profitable trade is the one that hurts us most in the long run - because it teaches us a bad habit.
When learning a foreign language, we have a teacher who corrects us when we say something wrong. In trading we don’t have a teacher - we have to be the teacher to ourselves. And that’s hard, because our brain is a master at making excuses for us.
3. Fighting the Desire for Quick Results
This is the hardest, most psychological layer. And the one that decides who, among those starting out, becomes successful and who washes out.
Imagine two people starting to learn Spanish. Both start on the same day. After three months the first one says: „This isn’t working. I’m not making progress as fast as I expected. I probably have no talent for languages. I’ll try Italian instead, they say it’s easier.“ After three months of Italian, again: „This is too slow too. I’m just not good at this.“
The second person, after three months, says: „I’m exactly where I should be. It’s only been three months. Onward.“
Five years later, the second person is bilingual. The first knows neither Spanish nor Italian.
In trading this happens all the time. People start with one strategy, after two months it’s not working, so they jump to another. That one isn’t working after three months, so they jump to the next. They cycle through scalping, swing trading, options, crypto altcoins, Telegram signals, copy trading and I don’t know what... They never stay anywhere long enough to give themselves a chance to actually understand what they’re doing.
This isn’t exploration. These are escapes. Escapes from the discomfort of uncertainty, escapes from the pain of losing streaks, escapes from the long and boring process of building real skill.
The desire for quick results is destructive in trading for several reasons:
- It leads to excessive risk. If we want to earn fast, we risk more. And when we risk more, one bad trade can sink us.
- It leads to overtrading. If we want it fast, we have to trade a lot. And when we trade a lot, most trades are necessarily lower quality.
- It leads to strategy hopping. When one doesn’t start working „fast enough“, we try the next. And we never work our way deep enough into anything for the strategy to actually start making sense.
- It leads to an inability to tolerate normal drawdowns. Because every minus we perceive as „this isn’t working“, not as „this is a normal part of the process“.
Fighting this desire is lifelong. Even after years, we’ll occasionally catch ourselves thinking „this could be working faster“. And in that moment we have to tell ourselves - like the Spanish vs. Italian guy - „we are where we should be. Onward.“
Why the Process Never Ends
And now probably the most uncomfortable thing to understand: the process never ends.
In music, the best guitarist in the world (for me it was Paco de Lucia in the past and now Vicente Amigo) still practices. Every day. Not because they can’t play. But because a skill that isn’t maintained is lost. And because there’s always something to improve. Always a new composer, always a nuance, always some detail we didn’t catch.
The market changes constantly too. What worked five years ago may not work today. What works today may not work five years from now. Volatility shifts, correlations shift, the dominant instruments shift, even the very structure of the market shifts (the rise of algorithms, HFT, the retail boom after the pandemic, and so on).
And we change too. Our capital changes, our life situation, our goals, our psychology. What suited us at the beginning may not suit us now.
So even when we become „a successful trader“ - whatever that means to us - the process doesn’t end. We keep studying, keep adapting, keep looking for new edge, keep working on our psychology. The difference between a beginner and an experienced trader isn’t that the experienced trader no longer needs to work. The difference is that the experienced trader knows the work is permanent and has accepted it.
Conclusion
If we’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance we’re at least starting to sense the process. Maybe we’ve already been burned looking for shortcuts, maybe we’ve cycled through a few strategies, maybe we’ve looked down the long road ahead and realized it’s not going to be quick.
The good news is that nothing’s actually running away from us. The market will be here tomorrow, in a year, in ten years. We don’t need to catch any „opportunity“ right now. There will be thousands of opportunities in our lives.
What we have to do is accept the process. The same way we do with a language, with music, with sport. Don’t think about when we’ll be „good“ - think about whether we’re a little better today than we were yesterday. Whether we learned something new today. Whether we made one less mistake today than we would have a month ago.
Success in trading is not a milestone. It’s a state we build every single day - and one we have to earn anew every single day.
And the money? That comes along almost naturally. As a by-product of having become someone who deserves it.
