Can you start trading at any age?
Some will attribute mistakes to youth. Some to old age. There may be other cognitive distortions. There are countless of them. But still, trading speaks the language of dry facts.
Were the trades made in strict accordance with the trading system? How many were there during the day, month, quarter, year? What is the percentage of positive trades? What is the final result?
If the profit in real trading is less than on a demo account, then those same "distortions" intervene. And the more of them, the greater the discrepancy. This is where the question of age would be appropriate. But from a different angle. Who can more easily avoid mental errors?
1. It wasn't age that made them successful
Mohammed Islam, a 16-year-old schoolboy from New York, earned several tens of millions of dollars trading stocks during breaks. Marty Schwartz, a former military man, took up trading after 40. And at 45, at a tournament in the USA, he showed a return of 781% per annum.
This is an insignificant part of the famous stories. In the non-public space, there are more impressive achievements. There are tens and hundreds of thousands of such traders. Not all of them are looking for fame. But they are united by similar qualities.
Both the schoolboy and the retired military man suffered a defeat at the beginning of their careers. They did not give up. They corrected their mistakes. They tried again. And achieved excellent results. It wasn't age that made them successful. But enterprise, persistence and discipline.
2. From 25 to 75
Benjamin Graham, a classic of securities analysis, proposed dividing investors into 2 categories. Defensive and aggressive. Depending on the type, it was necessary to select the shares of funds for passive and active forms of investment. The shares were distributed from 25.0% to 75.0% to 75.0% to 25.0%.
Everyone knows the classic. These proportions too. However, for some reason everyone forgot who Graham called a defensive and who an aggressive investor. Today, age is added to his rule and shares in the portfolio are calculated. But initially, the classic defined the type of investor by the willingness to spend time and effort.
A defensive investor strives to make minimal efforts. Make rare and easy decisions. And an aggressive investor, on the contrary, is ready to spend a lot of time and effort to find profitable deals. The level of risk has nothing to do with it. High risk is a characteristic of a poorly thought-out deal. All investors should refuse it.
Using the legacy of the classic, we can say that an aggressive investor is a trader. He likes to "look for gold." He likes to find profitable trading moments. If you feel the same, then trading is yours. Age has nothing to do with it. Warren Buffett bought his first shares at the age of 11. Jesse Livermore was even younger. And Marty Schwartz was trading successfully at 75.
3. The Right Way. Practical Recommendations.
The main thing is not to complicate things. In trading, everything is quite simple. You need to find a positive trading pattern (strategy). From 60.0% of positive trading operations out of 100, already a working option.
Include in the volume of the trade the possibility of a series of failures. Usually this is a stop loss from 0.25% to 1.00% of the deposit. Everything depends on the value of the pattern. And in no case deviate from the exact adherence to the trading strategy. Entry points, exit points and the volume of operations are constants. This is the right way to profitable trading. There is no other.
