Preparing to Move From Demo To Live Trading 2 of 7

Trading is not a natural endeavor for us. We have no basic skills or understanding of how it works when we first start out. We have to learn from scratch. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Some new traders have the all or nothing attitude with little or no training and soon lose some of their trades. Once they experience some losses then fear and pain set in. Most traders who trade without preparation are on a course of destruction.

They will destroy their trading accounts and or emotional strength so as to not be able to stay in the trading game. So the first order of business in avoiding the fear and pain in trading is to get some education.

Not only technical education of knowing when to enter and exit trades but, an education in understanding who you are as a trader, the physiological side of trading.

One of the basic laws of trading is to use and stick to a trading system. That means you use a trading system and have done enough paper trades to know what your win-loss ratio is. You need to do at least 100 trades.

This can be done in increments of 20 trades keeping track of the results. You may need to do 100 trades after you have figured out what works…the extra time will be well worth it. Once you have figured out what works for you, use the same criteria and procedures on every trade. No exceptions.

Paper trading makes it safe because there is nothing to fear because there is nothing to lose. If you are trading real money you won’t sit there and lose money in order to experiment to see what works. This is one reason that 80-90% of new traders fail; they do not learn how to trade before they try to become rich.

This is one thing for sure if you want to be successful at trading you need to study and practice. If you don’t learn how to trade before you start trading with real money you will go through a great deal of fear, pain, and loss of money.

Once you have developed the skills to follow a system. Knowing how to: pick a high probability trade set your stops manage the trade whichever way it moves then you are ready to move to the next lever. You are ready to open a live account.

This is where you will encounter loosing real money, having to admit that you were wrong on a trade or two.