Successful Trading is an Art in Reading

🎓 TRADER PSYCHOLOGY

Successful Trading is an Art in Reading

Successfully trading 📈 the market is very much an art in reading 📖 reading the tape, reading the chart 📊 , reading the fundamental news 📰 - whatever approach you take all of it boils down to understanding what the symbols are trying to communicate.💡

That’s why seasoned traders always talk about the need for “screen time” 🖥️ to understand the daily ebb and flows of price action. They can certainly be subject to many random forces (much like weather) but buying and profit-taking or short selling and covering ( which is just profit-taking in reverse) occur over and over every single day. 📈

To the uninitiated, it all looks like mumble-jumble no different than ancient hieroglyphics on pyramids of Giza. As a result, new traders often throw up their arms 🤷 and walk away from the market deeming all of it “random nonsense”. But of course, there is a method to the madness, but it requires patience to decode it. 🧩

There is one final aspect to trading that makes it even a bigger challenge than mastering reading. At the end of the day, all symbolic systems like math or alphabet or gene protein chains are exact and definitive. D-A-Y will always spell the word day in the English language. Not so in markets. Markets, because they are subject to ever-changing regimes, will only offer probabilities not precision. The pattern “D-A-Y” will never work 100% of the time because the meaning of the “letters” in the market remains permanently fluid. The symbols we are trying to deconstruct through charts, price action, or news are behavioral patterns and unlike letters of the alphabet or numbers on a page they are always context-sensitive. “DAY” could actually mean “NIGHT” under a different context. So we should never despair that we can only read at 70% proficiency. That’s actually an amazing skill and if we can achieve it then like our younger selves, we should never be disappointed but rather rejoice at the accomplishment. 🎉