Why won’t trading alone make you financially free?? Siam Kidd helped answer this question and more on our recent episode of The Trader’s Mindchat Show! He shared his experience with loss and the process by which he was able to learn from and turn those losses into profitable trades.
Watch Here for the Full “Trader’s Mindchat Show” episode with Siam Kidd
Siam is an ex RAF (Royal Airforce) Pilot that left to become a full time trader. He quickly lost everything on a silly trade. In order to get more capital to trade, he then focused his energies into the world of business. He now runs/owns 9 different businesses, including TheRealisticTrader.com where he helps mentor traders to help them on the road to financial freedom, manage risk, and reach their trading goals.
Here are Top Ten Trading Highlights with Siam Kidd:
- Logging/Journaling is the Magic Bullet of Trading. Without it you are never going to improve.
- You may know the stats or the different strategies, but it’s how you execute the trades that matter.
- Cement the Good Habits Through logging you can start cementing the good things that are working with your trading and build on all the good habits, while also analyzing the losing trades. This will help you go from a losing trader to a profitable one.
- Keep Educating Yourself! Recommends Van Tharp’s book “Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom.”
- Understand How Maximum Adverse Excursion and Maximum Favorable Excursions work. Maximum Adverse Excursions (winners) How much did it go under before goes in your favor. And Maximum Favorable Excursions (Losers). Helps you realize if you should delay your entry, get in at a better time and price, readjust your stop loss. Be sure to check out the Trader’s Mindchat video on Youtube where Siam provides Easy-To-Follow visuals of both of these processes for your reference. Watch it here:
- Review and Analyze Your Trades. Siam recommends taking screenshots of all your trades/entry/exit and 60 candles after (works in any timeframe). Then review your summary. You can use an excel spreadsheet if you don’t have more advanced software at this time.
- Treat Trading like a Video Game. You can always restart with Zero risk, especially if start with a dummy account. Get over your ego and if the emotional weight isn’t there with a dummy account, trade a small portfolio, like $2K so doesn’t eat up all your money.
- Don’t be a Strategy Hopper. Learn about expectancy. Give it time (even up to a year) to see what is working and what isn’t working with your process and through logging you can see what may need to be tweaked or changed. Don’t hook onto one thing to think it’s the only way that works.
- You Can Take a Losing Trade and Make it Profitable. Through analyzing your wins and your losses you have a treasure trove of information.
- Trading is an Amplifier. Trading alone won’t get you rich. You can be the best damn trader in the planet but with only a $500 account you’re not going to do much with it. Of course there is that 1 in a million story of the person who was able to do this, but they are typically the outliers. If you don’t have much money in your portfolio you’re not going to get rich trading. However if you have a decent size capital to work with, you can use trading to amplify your wealth. This is why Siam combines trading and business. since his business creates the cash flow and then he can work on growing it. Work on building capital first.
Subscribe to the Mara Wealth YOUTUBE channel https://www.youtube.com/marawealth for more great trading education and guest interviews!
To continue crushing it with your trading, check out the following MARA blog posts:
Top Ten Trading Highlights with Jason Graystone
Top Ten Trading Highlights from Adam Sarhan
4 Ways to Boost Trading Confidence!
Melissa Lamothe is a bestselling author and co-host of “The Trader’s Mindchat Show” with husband Michael Lamothe. Melissa has 15+ years of marketing and writing experience and is the marketing director/content supervisor for Mara Wealth.