A tailwind and headwind of trading

For more than two years, I studied and traded in the evenings or weekends, but for a month and a half, I decided to be a full-time trader.

Here are two significant forces I saw right after the change:

The information and tools you can get access to are crazy empowering! These are the tailwinds!

At work, you have the work ecosystem that gives you access to all the apps, resources, and tools available on your work computer and your personal ecosystem, which in my case, was not so complex, consisting mainly of Office 365, PDF readers, and browsers.

Once I started as a full-time trader, I understood that I had to build a more professional infrastructure of tools, access to information, and people so that I make good quality decisions.

I was just amazed at what I was seeing… The current advancement level gives you many powerful tools to create and succeed on your own.

Access to good quality information, project management tools, company reports and data, blogs, interviews, courses, cloud tools, podcasts, etc. etc., It's so much good quality stuff!

Here is what I have so far as premium accounts: WSJ, Bloomberg, Notion, Trade Ideas, Koyfin, Briefing.com, Office, TC2000, Slack, Discord, and many other smaller ones.

Besides the tools, there is also the power of communities which create, filter, process, and fine-tune data and give you the next level of information in some cases way better than the initial form that saves you time, gives you new perspectives, and empowers you even more.

It's something I was not feeling so evident when working full time, but the flow of information I got into is impressive. It looks like a revolution is happening next door, and because I was so much into my work, I was not seeing it so evident.

The human brain is quite limited. The headwinds!

Trading gives you a significant amount of data to process, and I was surprised that the brain is forgetting a much bigger part of it. I found myself recently in situations when I knew I studied something a year ago, and because I didn’t practice it, use it, or gave an exam on it, I just forgot it.

In school, we have tests, lectures and classes, and analysis and work groups that strengthen the retention of information. When I study on my own, all these activities are not so present, and the quantity of forgetting is way more significant.

I am sure I read what means QQQ and Nasdaq 100 some time ago, but I couldn’t remember it.

So there is bad news… you already forgot a lot of courses, articles, setup studies you learned, news, stock details, and helpful information, and possibly within 1-2 hours, you will forget what you just read.

Why are you telling me this?

The trading ecosystem is incredibly powerful; you are not alone if you decide to become a full-time trader. You need to find your way through it, but there is a lot of good stuff.

If you study in your free time and don’t put enough work, energy, and passion into it, you will forget it, and you will never get to that critical resultative mass you need to succeed, and it just may result in a lot of wasted time. You have to be very clear with what you expect from yourself when you study trading because to master the skill, you have to take it quite seriously.