Why not become your own trading teacher?

Most of us have heard of the “ten year rule”, which states that expertise in any performance field requires a minimum of ten years of learning and deliberate practice. Clearly, most of us cannot afford ten years of our lives to learn to master financial markets; few trading firms could or would support such an extended process

One important characteristic that separates a successful trader from his/hers less successful counterparts, I would say that the successful one maintains a learning culture.

A learning culture is one in which there is an explicit attitude and set of procedures to reflect upon recent experience, extract lessons from that experience, and use those lessons to guide future experience.

A learning culture can be maintained individually but if shared with other like-minded traders  it can become exponentially more powerful. Sharing your experience and learnings with the others has the outcome of reducing time: a person has gained a week’s worth of experience in a day, simply by assimilating the lessons of others.

This reduction of time is essential to a field such as trading, in which the learning curve may outlast one’s bank account.

Within a learning culture, however, a trader can gain ten years of experience in a fraction of that time. The key is learning from others and making use of proper tools for exploiting that learning. 

One practical way to do this for us, retail traders, is to become part of a social trading network.

When you’re surrounded by high performers, it brings out the best in you.