I’d like to dedicate this page to the All Star Traders here at Warrior Trading. These are traders who have provided substantiation of making over $1million trading.
As always, we want to be mindful about these claims and that their results are not typical. Since we do not track typical result of our students we cannot say our students are more or less likely to profit versus traders as a whole.
Having said that, these All Star traders are among the most successful traders who have ever been part of the Warrior Trading community.
Over the years I’ve sat down with many of these students to better understand their strategy and their journey.
Some participated in formal interviews that are part of chapter 17 of the Warrior Pro Course, while others have I just chatted with me during a seminar that I hosted in person.
I’d like to discuss a few of the similarities between the students and hint at what I think may be their natural attitudes and attributes that have set them apart from the rest.
Extremely driven, competitive and aggressive
Each of our all star traders display personalities consistent with being competitive, aggressive and extremely driven.
Well, it’s certainly possible to possess these attributes and not be successful as a trader, but I think in the case of these traders, a willingness to take risk and be aggressive is the reason they were able to scale their strategies all the way to 7 figures.
One of the big challenges with day trading is not just learning to trade but once you find some moderate success having the risk tolerance to risk what you’ve already made in exchange for the opportunity to take your strategy to the next level.
For instance, I found it in my own trading making $200, $300 and $500 a day has been fairly consistent if I focus on base hits with one entry and one exit.
However, to get to $1000, $2000, $5000 or even $10,000 a day it often comes at a sacrifice because instead of taking the base hit when I roll that into what I think is going to be a bigger trade.
If I’m right, I have a big green day but if I’m wrong I could close the day flat or even red. On the days that I close red it feels as though my drive to push harder came with the cost of a smaller but perhaps more consistent gain.
I have met traders who have become relatively content with smaller gains and don’t have the desire or the risk tolerance to try to scale up their strategy.
Sometimes scaling up a strategy also requires making changes to the tools you’re using such as switching to a broker design for professional traders utilizing more expensive tools and for some that increases the pressure it increases the cost and under that additional pressure they do not thrive.
I too have found challenges with putting to much pressure on myself and it causing me to become more emotionally activated during my trading which is resulted in bigger profit and loss swings which have not necessarily been positive for my career.
Perfectionist
In trading being a perfectionist most often means that you have a drive to do better. You see people who have done better, and you know that you’re capable of doing better. So you push yourself again and again and you push yourself harder and harder to try to achieve better results.
This again can create a lot of pressure and there are people who have the personality trait of being a perfectionist to find themselves spinning their wheels starting and stopping not able to complete projects or endeavors because their perfectionist behavior forces them to start over.
In my case and in the case of several of our All-Star student’s, perfectionism can be harnessed to drive you to try to compete at a higher level and to try to capture the most you can out of each opportunity.
When I think about trading, the thing that I find really interesting is the fact that every day is like a puzzle and you can always try to do better.
It would be almost impossible to solve the puzzle perfectly so to speak because you could always have gotten better entries and exits, you could’ve always traded with larger share size and there’s always going be someone who did better than you.
Because each day provides the opportunity to try to solve the puzzle better than the day before, I find myself driven and stimulated to want to improve. When I do have periods of struggling when the things that I think it’s been really important has been my drive to fix it.
I try to figure out what’s broken and I try to make it right. I’m willing to go back to the drawing board if I have to.
Having tasted the fruit of a successful strategy, when I struggle or am in a bit of a draw down, I am motivated to try to figure out what I can do to get it back on track. The market is not constant it’s always changing, however what is pretty consistent are the patterns of the market.
In developing your own memory of patterns and cycles you begin to equip yourself with this internal archive of market action and that allows you to capitalize on these reoccurring cycles trends and patterns that we see again and again and again.
Multiple sources of income
The majority of our all-star traders began trading from a place of comfort.
When you learn from a place of desperation, which is to say you are without additional sources of income, you have a small amount of money that is dwindling and you are relying exclusively on your successes in trading to potentially solve your problems, turn your life around, save your marriage, etc. you are positioned yourself in a pressure cooker.
The stakes are extremely high and they only get higher the longer you trade without turning a profit.
Well it’s certainly true that some people will thrive with high stakes and high pressure, most will find that it fuels emotionally activated trading which then results in poor decision making and unnecessary and potentially detrimental mistakes. This is how traders blow up accounts.
The all-star traders who come into the market with existing savings to live off of while they learn or consistent sources of income, are able to learn about the market from a position of genuine curiosity and interest. Each day they’re in the market they gain a little more experience, and they are able to absorb all the new information without unnecessary pressures.
From their perspective if it takes 2, 3, 4, 5 years or more before they generate any significant gains and that’s fine because in the meantime, they learned more about the market without this sense of urgency on having to perform right away.
At the end of the day it’s true that nobody wants to be actively in the markets for 3 to 5 years without having anything to show for it, but at the same time if you’re coming to the market from a genuine place of curiosity there is no question you were going to learn a tremendous amount in those first few years and that is going to motivate you to want to keep learning more.
Computer Savy
One of the things that I think made me especially well equipped to learn to trade was my computer skills.
Growing up I had a strong interest in computers, and I was fortunate enough to have the resources to learn about computers. So installing software related to trading, customizing the software and creating custom hotkeys we’re not only an easy task but actually a very enjoyable part of the process.
Additionally, quick typing skills and an ability to harness a computer as an extension of your body just as a carpenter will harness a saw as an extension in their body to create a beautiful peace piece of furniture, I never want to feel that I am the bottleneck between me in the market.
Wanting to immediately sell a stock and take profit but not knowing how to enter the order quickly enough before your profits disappear can be a devastated feeling
I do think it’s true that a certain level of equipment is required to trade. However, the speed of your internet or the power of the laptop aren’t necessarily deal breakers when it comes to making money consistently.
Quick decision makers
Being good on the computer and being able to be quick on the computer goes hand-in-hand with being able to make quick decisions and have a good hand eye coordination. Growing up in an era of video games and early computer games I feel that I was training from a young age to be a day trader.
To make quick decisions to commit to those decisions and see through the result and to be willing to start over and try again.
I think at a certain level of skill and experience trading can become very much driven by your intuition although in the moment it could be difficult to decipher intuition versus impulse. Sometimes I feel that my Trading and I see it in our All-Star Traders as well can be so quick it’s impulsive perhaps a good impulse if it’s a winner and perhaps not so good if it’s a loser.
I sometimes find that I make decisions so quickly that I need to actually slow myself down to think a little bit more before I pull the trigger. I found it’s easier to slow down in overly aggressive trader then to speed up for a trader who is afraid of taking risk.
My challenge has always been to slow myself down to prevent myself from chronic overtrading and to be able to know when to walk away.
Knowing when to walk away
Each Day you have to know when to call it a day and went to walk away. Many beginner Traders struggle with us they make a little bit in the morning they give it back mid day they make a little more in the afternoon and then they lose it before the end of the day.
The only people who make money on overtrading are your brokers. As day traders we have to be very disciplined about knowing when to take our money off the table and walk away. I’ve created a set of rules that dictate when I walk away and I found a trait with many of our all-star traders is having a similar set of rules.
Having these types of rules take the emotion out of the decision.
You’re simply following the rules are you already laid out for yourself.
Following the rules of your strategy
Hands-down one of the biggest attributes of an all-star trader is an ability to follow the rules of their strategy.
They know what works for them they know what produces profit and they know how to lean hard against their winners to scale their strategy. And since they know what works so well invariably they know what doesn’t work and they know when to step away.
It doesn’t mean they don’t have losses sometimes very big losses, it doesn’t mean they never get emotionally activated and make a poor decision, but it does mean over the long period, they know how to keep themselves green.
To the attributes that can be in conflict for an all-star trader is the willingness to take a lot of risk and to be really aggressive while at the same time carrying the discipline to follow the rules of your strategy and to know when to walk away.
I find that on each individual day I can get so hyper focused on achieving perfectionism hitting a new record that I can lose sight of the over arching rules of my strategy about when to stop when to slow down and when to accept a loss.
And the fact is the biggest Green Day I ever had started by getting knocked down below my max loss, only to aggressively break the max loss rule and jump on an opportunity and find myself green by nearly 500,000. Sometimes getting knocked down is what stimulates the aggression to trade really well while other times that aggression is not appropriate and will result in extending the losses.
Ultimately finding yourself in a flow state where you can actually trust yourself to make a decision and consistently come out on top is the goal for any trader.
This isn’t a state of Trading that is without rules but it’s a state of trading where you trust yourself to moderate your decision making, and where are you trust that the outcomes will be good.
Wrapping Up
To conclude while it’s true that our all star traders share many of the same positive attributes, it’s also true that every traitor has their own path and each trader has a strategy that is ultimately a reflection of their risk tolerance and their personality.
While many trade a strategy similar than mine, another way to phrase is is that I trade a strategy similar to many. I trade momentum. It’s a simple interpretation to say I buy high and sell higher, but ultimately that’s what momentum traders do.
This strategy is far from new. In fact this is a strategy that is as old as the market itself.
In the older days, this would be tape reading and jumping on the waves of buying. Since momentum trading has been around as long as the market I have faith that it will continue to exist for as long as there are equity markets to trade in.
I sometimes find myself dealing with stress cycles between hot and cold streaks, and one of the reasons that I have that stress is because I am really driven to trade as aggressively as possible.
I hope someday to be able to reduce the stress by reducing the pressure I put on myself, but that would require willingness to be less competitive less aggressive and less of a perfectionist. It’s hard to turn my back on the attributes that have contributed to my success.
So in the meantime I continue to put the pedal to the metal in the markets hot and try to slow down when it cools off before taking big losses.