Video Transcript:
Hi everyone, it’s Dale here. I’ve been trading since 2009 that’s about 16 years in the markets now. And trust me, I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way. I went down many dead ends, wasted time, money, and energy on things that simply don’t work. Today, I want to give you the shortcut. These are the most important lessons I wish I’d known when I started trading.
The first lesson is that indicators don’t work at least not the way beginners hope they will. When I started trading, I believed there must be some magic indicator, a holy grail, a perfect combination of settings that would tell me exactly when to buy and when to sell. So I wasted a lot of time searching for it. I kept installing new indicators, trying new settings, tweaking them, and adding more and more lines to my chart. I thought that once I found the right one, trading would be easy the indicator would do the thinking for me. That was the goal.
But here’s the truth: indicators don’t adapt to changing market conditions. They use only two inputs past price and time and that’s it. Every indicator is just a different visual of what already happened. So you end up with a hundred different ways of showing the same old data, and that’s why indicators fail.
Honestly, almost every beginner goes through this phase. It sounds so tempting: find the right tool, make easy money, no hard work, no thinking, just signals. But it doesn’t work that way. If you want to make money long term, you need to understand the market you need to learn to read price and what’s happening behind it.
So here’s how I would restart. If I began again, I’d delete every indicator from the chart and start fresh with a clean price chart. I’d only recommend starting again with one tool the Volume Profile.
Now, Volume Profile isn’t just another indicator that gives you buy or sell signals. It doesn’t tell you what to do. Instead, it shows market structure a kind of 3D dimension of the market. It shows where big players were active, and that helps you anticipate where the market is likely to react again.
Another thing I wish I’d known when I started is that every strategy and I mean every strategy has ups and downs. In more than 16 years of trading, I’ve never seen a strategy that wins no matter what. Markets change, volatility changes, behavior changes. Sometimes you’ll have great months, and sometimes you’ll hit a rough patch but that’s normal. The key is not to panic. Stick to a strategy you know is profitable in the long run.
To give you a real example: earlier this year, I had a rough period where most of my trades were losing or breakeven. There were only a few winners terrible. But the next month, the exact same strategy brought winner after winner I was trading with around a 90% win rate. The strategy was the same. I hadn’t changed a thing.
There’s no strategy that wins all the time, and it’s important to understand and accept that. Most beginners destroy themselves when they hit their first losing streak. They give up on the strategy, start looking for a new one, and the cycle repeats: new strategy, new losing streak, give up, and start over again. It’s a hard cycle to escape.
So how do you break it? You need to know your stats. You need to know what’s normal for your strategy. For example, I know that historically my strategy’s longest losing streak is five trades in a row. I also know my maximum drawdown. I’m mentally prepared for it if it happens again. I trust the strategy because I’ve seen its longterm performance.
Here’s the advice: understand that every strategy has bad periods. Know your stats. If everything is still within your normal range do nothing. Stick to the plan. Don’t jump to a new strategy. Confidence backed by real data is what gets you through tough times.
One of the biggest mistakes I made when I started trading was this: I was trading, but I wasn’t recording anything. I only looked at the final result profit or loss. But if you don’t know why you won or lost, you can’t improve. You can’t finetune your strategy. You’re just guessing.
When I was testing new strategies, I did it wrong. I only watched the equity curve if it went up, it was great; if it went down, I threw the strategy away. But here’s what I later realized: many strategies fail not because they’re bad, but because we don’t understand their strengths and weaknesses. Maybe the strategy works great on EUR/USD but not on indices. Maybe it performs well on Wednesdays and Thursdays but poorly on Mondays. Maybe it needs a different timeframe. Maybe one small filter could turn it from mediocre to profitable. The only way to discover that is through a proper trading journal real data and real tracking.
When I didn’t have a journal, I had no chance of improving anything. I was stuck in a loop. Journaling can break that cycle. Traders hate it it feels like extra work, it’s boring but if you want to get better, there’s no substitute. That’s why I track everything: what instrument I traded, which setup I used, time of day, day of the week, risk/reward, everything. Then I use those data points to analyze which markets give me the highest return, which days I perform best, and which setups have the highest win rate. That’s how you make real progress datadriven progress.
There’s one more thing that goes hand in hand with journaling: you must have a clear trading plan and follow it. If you don’t follow your plan, all your journal data becomes useless it’s not data about your strategy, it’s data about random trading decisions. If you want to test a system properly, you need to trade that system properly.
Back when I started, I did write a trading plan most traders do, at least a basic one. But to make real progress, your plan must be detailed and crystal clear. No guessing, no “I’ll decide later.” You need a written plan that tells you exactly what setups you use to enter a trade, how they should look, how to set takeprofit and stoploss, how much to risk per trade, how you manage positions, what to do in drawdown, and so on. Then you must follow it 100%. Only then does your journal become powerful because only then can you trust your data.
I get it traders hate writing rules. It sounds boring. They want to skip straight to placing trades. That’s exactly what I did when I started. I knew journaling and planning were important but I only did the bare minimum so I could get to the charts faster. The result? No progress.
Now I know the simple truth: without a detailed plan and a proper journal, you can’t improve. If you’re serious about trading, do this write a detailed trading plan, follow it, track everything in a trading journal, and improve using your own data. That’s how you turn trading into a professional process.
Another lesson I wish I learned earlier: don’t get stuck on demo. Use it only to learn how the platform works, then move to real money as soon as possible. Demo trading feels easy because there are no emotions you don’t care about losing fake money. Without emotions, anyone can follow a plan perfectly. But once you go live, everything changes.
With real money on the line, your brain starts sabotaging you. On demo, you can hold a trade with a 1:3 or 1:4 risk/reward easily. Live, your stoploss feels too close, your takeprofit feels too far. The price moves slightly in your favor and you think, “What if it reverses?” You take profits early, break your rules, and the strategy stops working not because it’s bad, but because fear changed your behavior.
This emotional pressure never shows on demo, but here’s a trick: even trading micro lots will trigger emotions. Risking just a few cents or dollars is enough to feel fear. If you want to learn real trading psychology, trade real money even if it’s only a few dollars. Open a small account, trade micro lots, smaller risks, but real emotions. That gives you a massive edge over those stuck on demo.
Another thing I got wrong in the beginning was thinking I could turn a small account say, $1,000 into a huge one. People online claim it’s possible, but there’s a problem: to get there, you’d need insane leverage, risk, and luck. The odds of blowing your account are very high.
When I started, I actually did this. I took big risks, and by some miracle, I made hundreds of percent gain in just a couple of months but it was more luck than skill. Under normal circumstances, it’s almost impossible to turn a small account into one you can live off. It’s not impossible, but very few people can do it and they need to be very lucky.
If you want to trade for a living, you need access to bigger capital. That’s the bottom line. You need enough capital to trade properly without excessive risk or gambling.
Now let me show you something. This is an interactive table that shows how much money you need to reach your monthly goal. Let’s say your goal is $5,000 per month. If your strategy has 10 trades per month, a 65% win rate, a 1:1 risk/reward ratio, and you risk 2% per trade this is how much you need to risk per trade, and this is the required account size.
If you want a professional income, you need a professionalsized account tens of thousands of dollars. Most beginners don’t have $80,000 or $100,000 to trade with. And even if they did, letting a beginner risk that kind of money is dangerous.
So what’s the solution? Prop firms. Prove you can trade responsibly, and they’ll give you real capital to trade with and you keep a big portion of the profits. When I started, prop firms didn’t really exist. I had to look for private investors it was slow, painful, and complicated. But today it’s much easier. If you can trade, you can get funded and turn trading into a serious business quickly.
If you want help with that, that’s exactly what we do in our Funded Trader Academy. We meet with traders every day in a live trading room, prepare them to pass funding challenges, help them scale up, and stay funded.
If you go to my website, TraderDale.com, and click the “FTA” button (Funded Trader Academy), you’ll get to the page where you can learn more. You’ll see the mentors, testimonials, and a button to schedule a call with one of us. We’ll walk you through the service, and then you can decide whether it’s right for you.
Now, let’s wrap up. If I had to start trading all over again, these are the six lessons I’d drill into my head from day one:
1. Indicators won’t save you learn to read the market, not decorate your charts.
2. Every strategy has ups and downs trust it through the rough periods.
3. Journaling is your fastest path to improvement data is your edge.
4. Follow a detailed trading plan discipline beats intuition every time.
5. Demo isn’t real you need to risk real money to learn real emotions.
6. You don’t need big capital to start you need skill first, then scale up with prop firm capital.
If you apply these, you’ll avoid years of wasted time, money, and energy and you’ll improve much faster. That’s about it, guys. I hope you liked the video, found it useful, and I’ll see you next time. Until then happy trading.
Comments
Post a Comment