We have to. We need practice and we also need the results to show if a strategy is working for us. For instance, only if we are consistently profiting monthly, then we should move to live trading. Ray Barros only considers a trader successful, if and only if, he/she has 3 years of consecutive profits. A strategy isn’t working if it were working for 1-2 weeks. It has to be working for months, for years and for life.

Can’t find time to trade? Then you may want to consider trading a different timeframe…

I don’t do back test

Then we have to wait longer before we are confident and comfortable with our strategies. I can complete back-testing  for 1 year worth of data in a few days. If we don’t backtest, we will need to wait for 1 year before achieving the same effect.

I am looking for the ultimate strategy

Then we will be kept very busy. Do you use indicators? Will you try to find the ultimate indicator? Some people use more than 4 indicators to “confirm with each other”. Which combination is the best? Not to forgot, we’ve got to do backtesting and forward testing to see if our strategy is the best. All these takes time.

But…do you know many successful traders don’t have strategies with high success rates? 40%, 50%, perhaps the best is 60%. You can find out more at traderinterviews.com.

I look at more than 1 instrument and more than 1 timeframe

Confusion, confusion, confusion. I am aware that some successful traders do look at more than 1 type of instrument. Eg, some play both futures and stocks. For aspiring traders, I recommend to just stick to 1 instrument and 1 timeframe at a time. There are many things to grapple with already.

I want to finish reading the trading books first

There are thousand and one trading books. After the books, there are tons and tons of knowledge on the internet. It will take donkey years before one can really “finish” reading everything. Furthermore, theory is very different from actual trading.

So…there are many ways we can waste time in trading. Beware.