I vividly remember how I started to trade 8 years ago, how I was learning, and the things that I was doing. Contemplating my old self, I notice a dramatic shift in my mindset in regard to trading. Staring at the charts and desiring to make money on price action, I wanted to become a consistently profitable trader. Making the priorities, I decided to sacrifice my time on studying technical analysis, totally neglecting trading psychology and risk management. Learning different trading strategies, I always came to the same result: the account went blown and nothing seemed to work. Strategies of fancy traders on YouTube, strategies from best-selling books on Amazon, nothing could produce any penny.
Not giving up and pursuing my ultimate goal, I came to the conclusion that I set my priorities absolutely incorrectly. To be honest, I always thought that trading psychology (like psychology in general) is s*cks. Moreover, I considered risk management to be kind of obvious, banal topic not deserving much attention.
Learning risk management techniques, applying them in day trading, I finally saw a glimmer of hope. Reading a dozen of books on trading psychology, contemplating my mistakes, and observing my behavior I noticed so many wrong, incorrect things that I did on a daily basis.
With time and practice, my mindset shifted. I realized that most of the strategies that I applied and that seemed losing to me, in fact, were decent. It turned out that mastery of technical analysis is not enough for profitable trading. Instead, that is just a tiny part of what must be learned.
Now, when my students ask me about the most important things to learn & study in trading, I always say: trading psychology and risk management go first, technical analysis is the secondary.
❗️ Do not neglect these topics and give them due attention. They are an essential part of your success in trading.