Community of Traders
Trading alone is very difficult and can be emotionally overwhelming. To whom will you ask your questions? It is beneficial to join a community of traders and ask questions, talk to them if needed, learn new methods and strategies, get some hints and alerts about the stock market, and also make your own contributions. Online trading rooms are excellent places for meeting like-minded traders, and they can be powerful learning tools.
Two long-standing educational communities are Don Kaufman’s trading room, TheoTrade (
www.theotrade.com
), which emphasizes technical trading across multiple markets such as Futures and Options, and the
trading room run by author John Carter and his colleagues (
www.
simplertrading
.com
). You should also take a look at the educational programs offered by Dr. Alexander Elder and Kerry Lovvorn (
www.spiketrade.com
) as a possible place for connecting with like-minded traders.
Indeed, if you have a favorite trading platform or application, connecting with traders who are using the same tools can be quite valuable. Trade Ideas
(
www.trade-ideas.com
) runs educational programs and online chatrooms for their users that I’ve found useful.
I personally trade in our chatroom at Bear Bull Traders with some of my friends and family, in addition to a group of serious traders. We can talk to each other and everyone can view my live screen and platform and watch how I am trading. It is a fun, interactive environment, and we all learn from each other. I frequently answer questions from other traders, and if there is anything I’m not sure of, I will ask other traders. There are some experienced traders in our chatroom who I learn much from, and we tip each other off about potential good trades and setups. We would like to grow our chatroom slightly and
therefore everyone who is reading this book is welcome to join with us. You will benefit from both watching me trade and hearing my responses to questions people have, including your own questions. Don’t be shy to ask!
New and developing traders will absorb the knowledge of mentors and experienced traders like a sponge; this helps them establish the right trading behaviors faster and more effectively. When you share your trading results and your ups and downs with other professionals, you turn social interaction into social learning. Find experienced traders who will not hesitate to tell you when you are making a mistake. It is in interacting with other traders that you will learn to teach yourself.
If you join a chatroom, you will see that quite often even very senior traders will lose money. It is always a good feeling to see that losing money is not just limited to yourself, but that everyone, including the most experienced of traders, have to take some losses. It is part of the process.
It is extremely important to remember, however, that you should not follow the pack. You need to be an independent thinker. Don’t blindly follow the crowd but do partake of the benefits inherent in being part of a trading community that fits with your personality. People often change when they join crowds. They become more unquestioning and impulsive as they follow the herd. Stressed traders in online communities nervously search for a leader whose trades they can mirror and then, when those trades don’t work out, who they can
blame their losses on. They react impulsively with the crowd instead of using their own common sense and reason. Chatroom members may catch a few trends together, but they will also get killed together when trends reverse. Never forget that successful traders are independent thinkers. Simply use your judgment to decide when to trade and when to not.