Speculation is a branch of trading, but nonetheless, it is a business. Specifically, it is your business. There are trader-managers, i.e., traders whose task is to sell a certain product at a certain price or, conversely, to buy a certain product at a certain price. They have seemingly the same responsibilities. They receive bonuses for buying or selling at better prices, they have their plans, but those plans are not determined by them. They are merely executors, not the ones to decide at what level to sell or buy. The earnings of an ordinary trader typically come from the ratio of their trading turnover to the purchase or sale price. If you are a seller, you must sell a certain volume within a set time, if you are a supplier, you must acquire a certain product and deliver it within the specified time. These traders are a link in the production and consumption chain of humanity. After them, there is usually someone else to correct the situation or, in extreme cases, if the chain is regular (and it usually is), adjustments will be made in the next cycle.
Speculators, on the other hand, have a different task; they must ALWAYS generate a profit S within a certain time T. Even if a speculator works with someone else’s money, they run their own business. Because there are no speculators who work for a salary. Each of them is interested in profit percentage, and unlike an ordinary trader, no one will interfere in the speculator’s work. This is because it is their working strategy, and no one else can understand it better than they do.
It is very important to understand that there are no ready-made recipes in any business. Otherwise, there would be no bankruptcies. Therefore, before you engage in speculation, you must ask yourself if you are ready to run your own business at all. Any business is an uncertainty, a step beyond the visible, and no one knows where you will end up after taking that step. Before taking this step, you must believe in yourself, and in your abilities; you must simply radiate the energy of a winner. I believe that behind every successful business, there is a graveyard of its competitors. Only true strength, calm, and confident, can radiate such energy.
This is not magic or sorcery; such strength is based on a mindset. And you can learn this mindset.
First, set yourself tasks/goals. Goals should be big and ambitious. A big goal provides multiple ways to achieve it, and an ambitious goal gives you the energy you need in difficult times. Do not hesitate to use your imagination. A person without imagination looks dull.
If your imagination extends only to spending money, you are probably doomed. This can be called a star disease. Even if you have the best strategy in the world today, you will soon get tired of working and want to rest, to rest beautifully and luxuriously as you can afford. During the rest, you might not want to return to work, thinking that everything is fine, you have the best strategy, so you can rest a bit more. But while you rest, someone else, obsessed, works and changes the world. And when you return, you find that the strategy is no longer as good, it needs to be changed, which means more stress, or you can try to sell that old strategy to people and live off what worked yesterday. People love this. They don’t even consider that it might not work anymore.
You need to love your business; you need to live it. Paradoxically, but the less rest you allow yourself, the more vivid emotions you will experience. Instead of mundane routine, you will feel the taste of life. I repeat, this is not magic, it is a mindset that translates into a lifestyle.
But let’s get back to that “Big Ambitious Goal.” It allows you to break through, to truly aim high. For this, you must be prepared to do at least two things.
First – your readiness to take risks. There is no bang without risk. The absence of risk is the main risk, and this must be realized and accepted. If you want to bang, you must think irrationally; following the rules leads to mundane gray existence. This is not BANGING, this is PAGING (PAG – Petite Ambitious Goal), meaning you won’t truly try, you won’t taste success, and you won’t get back the time you spent.
Second, you must be able to acknowledge mistakes and seek the right solution. And I am very grateful to those who tell me when I’m talking nonsense. It is very important to quickly understand and determine what you are dealing with – call shit shit or call gold gold. Speed is perhaps as crucial in trading as in sprinting in athletics.
But to act irrationally and quickly adapt, you need to know what it means to act by the rules. You cannot always bang; sometimes, if you are going in the right direction, you need to simply follow the rules, but you are not fiddling around, you are accumulating energy for a new leap. Hence, the next point is that recovery periods are necessary when you strictly follow the rules. At the same time, it must be understood that it is very difficult for a winning person to force themselves to act according to the rules. This is the most challenging period in trading education, when you are forced to act by the rules that are not intended for a leap into a new dimension but are necessary to understand and develop criteria for evaluating and changing your actions.
To sum up. If you decide to engage in such a branch of trading as speculation, you must be able to love the state of stress. Have the imagination to set the most unrealistic goals, know perfectly how the market lives and breathes to find an unconventional and unorthodox solution for a breakthrough, have a fast system for evaluating and changing actions, and strong discipline to act routinely by the rules while assessing the market situation.
I provide all points except the flight of your imagination to those who are ready to withstand it. Moreover, the period of fiddling around at the market is over for us; we have rocket launches ahead. And I am incredibly glad that I managed to create a small community capable of this.
