How To Be A Successful Trader – 10 Traits A Trader Must Know

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Have you ever thought of what traits make a successful trader?

Here, we will walk you through the 10 traits on how to be successful from the eyes of an expert trader. We’ve got Ezekiel Chew – the Founder and Training Lead at Asia Forex Mentor. Chances are, you may have been trading for a while now. And the truth is – Forex trading is not a career for a super-fearful soul. Fear only pushes you into losing trades.

Reading through, you’ll gauge yourself, and it will be best if you see yourself from the eyes of an expert. Only then can you grasp trade management skills and know where you fall regarding each trait in relative terms. The traits we share here are the views of a veteran who’s been at it- trading for over a decade. And we can therefore have faith in his views without any doubt.

If you feel very low in terms of a trait here, allow yourself to feel challenged. But most important, feel the inspiration to cultivate that trait. We are habitual beings. With that said, one can take on the slow steps to transform from nil to pro. And that will be for the overall god of yourself and especially matters regarding your trading career.

How to be a Successful Trader: 10 Traits On How To Be A Successful Trader

Trait 1: Always Be Willing to Learn

The trait of willingness to learn plays a critical role in your progress as a successful trader. While most wannabe traders are not born with the trading skills, the skills-set needed is largely learnable depending on an individual’s willingness.

Willing to learn will cascade across three phases for the forex trader. First is the phase of basic skills – where one is getting onboard. The second will come to the intermediate stage of knowledge in trading spheres. And lastly comes the third – the advanced forex trader phase – where one is at an expert- level in knowledge and matters trading.

Right after the start, it’s very tempting to make trades by looking at the charts. As a trader, you should learn to calm down and take the time to analyze the markets. Hasty trading by looking at charts and believing you will make profits is one of the worst recipes to lose money in Forex markets.

While learning the skills for successful trading, pay attention to three key pillars to help your odds of a fruitful process:

Master reading of Currency trends

A single glance at the charts should not trigger you to make any buy or sell transactions. For instance, a pair could be on a downward trend that reverses when you set your eyes on the screens. Picking a sell right on the spot will thrust a trader into a bad trade. Many new traders fall into such scenarios – many times. Critically analyzing the charts on long timeframes enables one to spot zones where selling or buying pressure is building up adequately – and join the market at the right spots on time.

Keep a Currency Pair Watchlist

Be willing to watch a handful of currency pairs very critically. You have to move away from chasing the entire market. It helps you by looking at a few pairs of factors and news triggering the moves. Also, keep track of affairs happening in the countries of the currencies under your whitelist. You will build a lot of patience with a few pairs and avoid the hectic scenarios of chasing many currency pairs altogether.

Start with a Small Account

Starting small helps you test things in a scenario where you will burn yourself slightly if things go wrong. Allow yourself to lose a dollar or two with a small account. It will get you learning so much regarding live trading while avoiding losing huge loads of capital.

When you succeed consistently, you add more capital and move cautiously. Learning to start small tests your patience and helps you reduce on chances of losing capital via losing trades.

Anyone can get into a bad trade, but correct trading significantly minimizes the loss in any losing trades.

Accepting to learn builds your confidence and hands-on focus on trading the successful way. If you want to trade without learning, it’s akin to driving a vehicle without ever learning how to do it in the first place!

Trait 2: Do Lots of Experiments

On your journey to a successful trader, allow yourself room to do lots of experiments. Why? You’ll find a strategy that works out of the many experiments for your case. The best way to go about it is to ride on strategies that experts have used in the past, And go overboard – try improving on one or creating a hybrid from several and documenting your results.

While testing the strategies, always build everything on caution that increases your odds of profitability and minimizes the risks of losing capital.

One leeway is to vault your experimentation by exploring things with demo accounts. The reality is demo accounts may not give you the experience with live trading, but it’s a great way to test strategies and grasp the ins and outs of trading. On a contrary note, demos give you all the time you require with reading and analyze charts away from the real possibility of losing a trade.

Trait 3: Choose the Right Capital to start trading

Starting with an account with reasonable capital is a critical component of successful trading. You can begin with an account holding $1,000.00, but the more, the better it is for you. Unfortunately, Forex marketers preach to newbies about making significant returns, but that isn’t good with market realities – especially when vigorous market swings happen.

Small capitals are okay to start but can lead you into emotional turmoil when you lose consistently. You’re more vulnerable to blowing accounts with low capital, while slightly more could afford you the margin to hold on to a trade that would eventually take good profits.

Another dynamic approach would be trading one pair per small account with reasonable capital. Opening many trades in one account is another hidden way traders almost unknowingly increase lot sizes. It’s multiples the greed, which is one lethal ingredient of trading the wrong way.

Trait 4: Effective Use of Leverage

Leverage is the primary catalyst that drives successful traders bagging in huge profits. Leveraging enables traders to control huge profits, even under circumstances where they have small amounts of capital. Unfortunately, equally lethal, huge leverage yields enormous losses for any trading gone wrong.

Successful traders should approach leverage with caution – it’s a double-edged sword. While starting on a live account, limit leverage to 10:1 – meaning you do not trade more than 10% of your capital at any one time. That allows your trades ample breathing space with meager chances of margin calls, which are why accounts blow.

Therefore, your success as a trader zeros into managing leverage to take up the opportunities it offers while preserving capital and growing it incrementally.

Trait 5: Optimistic Attitude

Optimism is the ultimate view of positivity in many spheres that rock human life. It’s the product of self-belief that things are complex, but we have everything it takes to make things better through days. An optimistic trader knows that markets can throw uncertain curveballs at any moment – yet they take every caution to anticipate that and survive through.

 Being a successful trader is a long-term goal, and no short-term drawbacks should derail you from your vision. Often, we see successful traders, and what we see are tips of icebergs – in reality, the inner self is perseverance, learning,  and skepticism which they’ve managed to conquer all through.

Psychologically, a human is a total of what one thinks. Optimism in trading believes in sheer luck that you will make it. Therefore, as a successful trader, read and implement what takes to the path of success – optimism only serves to reassure yourself when things go wrong, to hold onto that enduring path. An optimistic trader chooses success where pessimists would resign to fate- forever!

Trait 6: Exceedingly High Self-Esteem Plus Self-Worth

The nexus of high esteem and worth is a catalyst that builds into a trader’s ability to believe in the ability to trade successfully. In life, and in many spheres that come along – trading inclusive, it’s hard to get success if in the first place you do not believe in it.

Keeping trying and searching for a solution in the form of a working strategy is the living spirit that helps you keep at it. If you ask every successful trader – none of them was born successful. They took the little confident steps to summon the strength in the tried and tested knowledge.

Looking at it from a different angle, believing is a proverbial journey of a seed – as small as the mustard seed- one that winds blow as they wish. That’s you as a beginner trader – however, over time, you grow towards a successful trading trajectory. You end up like a vast tree that withstands all storms. You survive the markets, even in the worst scenarios of black swans hitting you from adverse angles.

What if the mustard seed refuses to grow in fear of loss and challenging conditions? Facing challenges makes us grow – and self-esteem and worth only serve as catalysts for us to grow towards successful directions in trading Forex.

Trait 7: Stay Away From Charts and Screen

A successful trader should find a balance – trade calmly while allowing other passions or life obligations to take an almost ordinary course in life. Avoid a scenario where you stare so much at the screens and forget to grab dinner. No, life has to go on.

You can find a way to check on the progress only three times a day and go on with life. Trading is not a matter of life and death – unless you are trading wrongly. The best antidote to help you avoid charts and anxiety is doing adequate analysis and trading the few trades you can take on smartly. Make a point to trade on quality and not quantity.

The frantic nature of trading comes from greed and stirring the case to the worst when you enter markets at the wrong points. Besides everything else, calm trading helps you take small losses, and you’ll always live to recover them and trade your way to success.

Trait 8: Sticking To A Plan

A trading plan is a strategy that you adopt to take your trading to the next steps toward success. While working towards your strategy, you’ll need to cultivate ownership of it, and most important is your ability to follow the trading rules you’ve set.

• There’s no correct way to tackle the Forex markets regarding strategies. The essence should be a keen study of the currency pairs you target and whether your strategy will work for your case. One strategy can work for a particular currency pair but fail for another pair. So studying charts has to go deep enough to fit a strategy for it.
• Your efforts to customize a trading strategy should feature the risk-reward ratio, which again suits a risk profile for an individual trader. To get to the bottom of this, you’ll need to take time and pay attention by using analyzing tools for market analysis techniques which will give you the best odds of making it.
• Lastly, with a strategy, test it over demo accounts ruthlessly enough to see what outcomes you get. When one gets to a tried and tested strategy, you’ve paid into the analytical portion, which helps with your odds of making it in the market with a specific pair.

Trait 9: Tap Into Your Abilities with a Defined Style of Trading

As a trader, you have to hone your trading style to a superior level. And that means doing many trials towards your perfection. When you have your hands on it, leave enough room to experiment and learn to improve on its precision constantly.

While refining your defined style, create a standard approach – where you hit the markets with your risk profile, defining your risk appetites. The knowledge of personal limits brings you closer to the opportunities you can take on or forget about entirely.

No strategy is superior to what you’ve best used and made profits. Define your style and improve it to your best strategy.

Trait 10: Control Your Emotions to Minimize Losing Trades

Markets never forgive – you do not own them. You make the wrong move, and you get a ruthless punishment. Remove your emotions by keeping them under control- that’s how you allow persistent analysis to keep improving your trading performance.

Hitting on the markets with emotions, you risk doing a host of many things wrong:

• You want to overtrade to recover losses from a losing trade
• You trade with impulses as the markets shift and move
• You wish to revenge-trade to cover for missed opportunities – only to end in losing trades
• You get lost in many trades  and threatening margin calls
• Your fear and excitements see you hesitate, miss a good entry, or take profits too early

When you have your emotions under control, you pick the right things trading – and best when you do this with few quality trades.

Emotional trading sees you ride markets roughly, and they too ride on your capital with equal or severe roughness.

To help you garner control of your emotions, here are three points to help evaluate your trading vis a vis emotion:

• Are you fearful or nervous? You are over-trading or using a lot of sizes that are higher than average. (high chances of losing trades).
• What’s your conviction and excitement? You have to go for trades that guarantee a greater assurance of winning. Yet, not too excited to take the profits. Calmness in good trading shows you everything is moving in a good direction, and just in case, you can escape with small profits or losses and recover that another time.
• Are you trading greedily or feeling overconfident? You are moving away from being calm. That point to a bad trade. Most traders forget to check if you have a stop loss in place, a realistic take profit position, or everything if your set-up makes sense.

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Conclusion: How to be a Successful Trader

So much for the traits. But can these make you the most successful or consistently profitable trader? Certainly Yes, but there are some no’s. Successful trading is the culmination of many building blocks that come into place at the right time. There are many other factors, but the traits listed here play critical roles in shaping the trading strategies and opportunities for success.

The beauty of successful Forex trading is that you can learn to cultivate the traits you need to be good. While mentors and trainers can show you around numerous things (including technical analysis) regarding matters trading, the traits are mostly a forte of personal choice.

There’s a mention of learning all along. Accepting to change and learning plus improving on the traits combines into a sure model for taking you closer to the hallmarks of a successful trader. Reading from this post, you’ll be at great odds of making it as a good trader. However, remember that you cannot grasp everything from this post. Make your habit of picking the basics from this post, practice even more, and refine strategies the most. And you’ll be sure to head in the right direction- where you don’t lose money and become a consistently profitable trader.

With everything held constant, your learning is fundamental and more so the seriousness you take on with it. One other fact is no trader wakes from bed in the morning only to make $1,000,000 in a single day or from one trading position! The truth is, it’s not a far-fetched dream if you take the time to learn from experts. Once you accept transforming, Forex trading remains an open ground for you to rule and excel.

Best Forex Indicators FAQs

What makes a trader successful?

The making of a successful trader gets into the markets and grows in place of incurring consistent losses – or blowing accounts. It’s not an easy level to make it to because it requires a balance of many factors concurrently. Being successful at trade management assumes that you’ve grown past the basic and intermediate levels and performed exceedingly to stay at the top.

Making successful traders takes patience, willingness to learn, and nature the traits that give you a lifeline surviving the markets where a new trader makes one bad trade after another consistently. FX takes a distinct learning curve for every trader, and pro-traders trade calmly at the end of the tunnel.

They do not fear what will happen in the markets as they’ve already taken due steps to take profits, lock profits or escape with a small loss. To sum everything up, a successful trader goes about life usually, they are not stuck in a series of worries of a trade going wrong. Utmost, a successful trader harnesses personal emotions, studies the markets, and chases very few high-quality trades – not many trades with little returns or losses at worst.

How much do successful day traders make?

As to how much successful day traders make is a relative question. FX is an arena where you find many strategies to help traders get an edge. Day trading requires traders to close out transactions by the close of business daily. The need to close trades presents a challenging scenario – the traders for the day category must be aptly conversant with daily market volumes and the backdrop of economic news that hits the fundamentals. They also must be brilliant in technical analysis.

The best way to trade is to get at it long-term. You must minimize the chances of losing money. Day trading confines your analysis and trading to the timespans of a day. Taking time to analyze markets in no hurry and taking few quality trades is the best way to engage in FX as a career for life.