Is Failure really failure?

Greetings friends and thanks for stopping by my blog.

   What I wanted to talk about is the word failure. Ever since I was a kid the word  failure has been burned into my brain as a bad thing. "You Failed" was what I heard a lot growing up but is failure really a bad thing? Ask Thomas Edison who failed 10,000 times while trying to invent the light bulb. What if he had given up after 9,999 times where would we be today? I am sure we would still have light bulbs but who knows how much longer it would have taken to invent. The Chinese do not really have a word for failure , their word means opportunity. What a great philosophy to have , you never fail at anything you just get another opportunity to figure out the right way.

Thomas J. Watson , the founder of IBM, was once asked in an interview what advice he had for young entrepreneurs his simple answer was " Double you rate of failure" , again what a great philosophy to have.  The reason why I am speaking about this is that I had a series of losses in my trading last week. I tried to be a day trader. I tried to "quantum leap" the system so to speak.

Some of the best advice I was ever given on the subject of trading was to start with the higher time frames like daily charts and slowly work your way down. Test your strategy for at least 3-6 months and if profitable then trade real money. Only after you have traded successfully with real money for 6 months or so should you think about moving down tot he lower time frames. Well I decided I was good enough to just move forward anyway.

I have a trading system that I use , which you can see on my you tube channel click here that was working pretty well for me. I have a full time job also and seeing as how I work from home I assumed I could just be a day trader since I basically had 24 hr access to the market.

Let me just say that that was the biggest mistake I ever made. My regular day trading strategy was based on 1 hour charts and I was also trading news on a 5 minute chart. So I started day trading about 2 weeks ago using this system. I had some wins and some losses doing it which was probably pretty average but then I started to notice something. Not only was I having to take time out of my job every hour to look at the charts to see if there were any set ups , which caused me to negate my work at my full time job, but my losses were starting affect me in my personal life. I was snapping at my wife allot and I was in a real bad mood all the time and I kept losing more and more.

Finally when my account was about half way gone I took a step back and decided it was time to reevaluate.  That was another good piece of advice I received as a new trader. So I decided that day trading was not for me right now. I decided to go back to what made me successful in the beginning and take the advice on trading the larger time frames. Well I am happy to report that I started this on Monday and have already had 2 trades win. Had I not taken a step back and re assessed my trading plan and strategy and not just kept doing what I was doing I was surely on my way to being part of the 90% of traders who fail at this.

In closing remember that failure is just another word for opportunity !

Happy Trading ,

Pipmeister