Level Of Trader

Trader Level 1

Level 1 Unconscious Incompetence

Begitu kamu beres menandatangani agreement trading, disinilah kamu berada. Kamu menjadi trader karena kamu mendengar bahwa pendapatan seorang trader bisa mengalahkan pendapatan seorang direktur BUMN. Lagi pula saat simulasi kamu telah profit 3 kali lipat, lalu apa susahnya?.

Kamu mungkin bisa profit dengan hasil yang menakjubkan 100 poin sampai 200 poin per lot per hari, namun itu semua hanyalah beginner luck saja. kamu pada awalnya tidak akan percaya, dengan hanya mengandalkan 1 indicator saja, atau bahkan hanya dengan insting ( baca artikel tentang insting di psikologi trading), toh kamu bisa profit.

Namun sayangnya, market akan mengalahkan kamu. Tidak ada trader yang sukses hanya dengan faktor LUCK. loss demi loss menghampiri kamu, kamu mencoba bertahan namun kalau sampai margin habis, siapa yang bisa tahan??.

Kamu sama sekali tidak menyadari bahwa kamu tidak bisa trading, kamu tetap mengira kamu bisa trading walaupun semua fakta berkata sebaliknya ( apakah bulan ini profit?, bulan kemarin profit?, tahun ini profit? ).

Kamu tetap mengira bahwa kamu adalah orang yang spesial, orang yang akan mampu mendapatkan kunci kekayaan dari trading. Dan kamu tidak menyadari bahwa 90% trader yang gagal juga mempunyai perasaan seperti itu. Kamu tidak mempunyai sistem yang kumplit, kamu dikuasai oleh emosi kamu, kamu selalu averaging posisi jika loss karena kamu ANGER pada market, kamu selalu take profit dalam jumlah yang kecil atau membiarkan profit berubah jadi loss karena kamu dikuasai oleh GREED, kamu tidak pernah trading karena kamu takut / FEAR. Kamu membiarkan diri kamu dikuasai oleh emosi sehingga margin equity kamu menderita.

90% orang yang trading hanya sampai pada level ini, mereka biasanya kapok, berhenti trading dan menganggap ini semua hanya mimpi buruk belaka. sebagian lagi moralnya anjlok, mereka tetap mencari investor dan trading seperti orang gila. dalam sebulan atau dua bulan margin habis lalu mereka mencari mangsa lagi.
Mereka masih mengaku sebagai trader namun sebenarnya mereka executor. dan biasanya yang moralnya anjlok ini dengan senang hati akan menjabat sebagai managemen di brokernya. lalu sebagian lagi akan tetap ngantor seperti biasa dan mengaku trader tetapi tidak pernah trading, mereka biasanya menyalahkan dirinya sendiri.

Hanya masalah waktu, sampai kapan mereka dapat bertahan di level ini dan waktu selalu menang.
90% Trader ada di level ini, dan hanya 10% sadar dan pindah ke level 2.


Trader Level 2

Level 2 Conscious Incompetence

Di level ini kamu sadar bahwa kamu tidak bisa trading, kamu tidak memiliki kemampuan untuk trading yang menghasilkan profit secara konsisten. Dan kamu tahu solusinya, kamu sadar bahwa selama di level 1 pikiran kamu dikaburkan oleh emosi kamu sehingga kamu tidak bisa berpikir secara jernih.

Di level ini kamu akan mencari holy grail ( system yang sempurna, system yang 100% profit, system yang tidak pernah loss), kamu mulai membeli system yang ada di internet, kamu membaca semua website yang ada tentang trading mulai dari UK, USA, Australia, Europa sampai Russia, kamu baca semua ebook yang ada, kamu praktekan semua system yang kamu peroleh, kamu haus akan ilmu seperti seorang pengembara di padang pasir yang haus akan air minum.

Pada level ini kamu akan membaca semua detail tentang indikator, kamu akan test semua indicator yang ada di metatrader, bahkan kamu mungkin akan membuat indikator sendiri ( biasanya gabungan 2 atau 3 indicator), kamu akan bermain-main dengan moving average, fibonnacci lines, pivot point, camarilla pivot, deMark, Fractals, Divergence, DMI. ADX, Bollinger Bands, dan ratusan indicator lainnya.

Kamu tahu bahwa market terlalu rumit untuk di predict hanya dengan 1 indicator saja, kamu tahu kombinasi ideal dari masing-masing indicator. kamu tahu percis keunggulan indicator tersebut dan juga kelemahannya.

Kamu akan mencoba menerka TOP dan BOTTOM dari market dengan indicator tersebut. kamu akan bergabung dengan chat room trader dan menanyakan pertanyaan-pertanyaan bodoh pada trader senior. karena kamu tahu kalau kamu tidak bertanya sekarang maka selamanya kamu tidak akan tahu.

Pada akhirnya di level ini kamu akan mendapatkan 5 sampai 10 system yang lengkap dan mencoba mencari tahu system mana yang paling cocok dengan kepribadian kamu.

Dari 10% trader yang ada di level ini, hanya sekitar 7% yang berhasil pindah ke level 3.


Trader Level 3

Level 3 The EUREKA Moment

Pada akhir level 2, kamu akhirnya menyadari pokok permasalahan bukan terletak di system. Kamu menyadari bahwa kamu bisa mendapat profit bahkan jika hanya menggunakan system yang simpel seperti moving average saja tanpa ada indicator lain, jika kamu bisa menggunakan kepala kamu dan money management yang benar.

Kamu mulai membaca buku tentang psikologi trading, dan mengidentifikasi dengan karakter yang dijelaskan dalam buku itu. Akhirnya datanglah Level Pencerahan.

Level pencerahan ini membuat otak kamu menyadari satu hal yang penting, di dunia ini tidak ada seorang pun yang mampu memprediksi secara akurat apa yang akan terjadi pada market 30 detik kemudian.

Kamu mulai menguasai satu system trading dan memodifikasinya sehingga sesuai dengan karakter kamu, dan mampu memberikan lebih banyak profit dibandingkan system yang asli.

Kamu mulai trading jika kamu tahu probabilitas untuk profit lebih besar daripada untuk loss, kamu hanya trading jika ada signal dari system kamu, kamu selalu menggunakan stoploss, karena kamu tahu stoploss adalah resiko bisnis yang ada dalam dunia trading.

Ketika stoploss kamu kena, kamu tidak emosi karena kamu tahu tak seorangpun bisa memprediksinya, dan itu bukan kesalahan kamu. Trading berikutnya akan meningkat probabilitas profitnya karena kamu tahu system kamu itu system yang profit.

Kamu secara seketika menyadari bahwa dalam dunia trading hanya ada satu hal yang penting yaitu konsistensi pada system, psikologi trading dan money management kamu. Dan kedisiplinan kamu untuk melakukan trading apapun yang terjadi.

Kamu mempelajari tentang money management, 2% risk, dan hal lainnya. dan hal ini mengingatkan kamu 1 tahun yang lalu ketika ada yang memberi nasehat yang sama padamu dan kamu memilih untuk mengacuhkannya. ketika itu kamu memang belum siap namun sekarang kamu siap.

Di level pencerahan, otak kamu akan menerima bahwa kamu tidak bisa meramalkan pergerakan market, karena memang tak seorang pun bisa.

Dari 7% trader yang ada di level ini, hanya sekitar 5% yang berhasil maju ke level berikutnya.

Trader Level 4

Level 4 Conscious Competence

Oke, Sekarang kamu hanya trading jika dan hanya jika system kamu memberi signal.
Kamu cut loss sama gampangnya dengan take profit. karena kamu tahu system kamu akan lebih banyak memberikan profit daripada loss, dan cut loss yang kamu lakukan adalah resiko bisnis yaitu max 2% dari account kamu.

Di level ini kamu memulai target dengan profit 20 point per hari, dan setelah kamu mampu melakukannya secara konsisten selama beberapa minggu, kamu meningkatkan target dengan 40 point per hari. Dan hal itu pada akhirnya mampu kamu lakukan.

Kamu memang masih harus kerja keras untuk mendapatkannya, memperbaiki system kamu, menguasai emosi kamu, dan melaksanakan money managemen yang kamu pegang.

level ini biasanya berjalan sekitar 6 bulan.

Dari 5% trader hanya sekitar 3% yang sanggup maju ke level berikutnya.


Trader Level 5

Level 5 Unconscious Competence

Nah sekarang kamu sampai di level 5, ini adalah level yang paling diharapkan oleh seluruh trader di dunia ini, di level ini kamu bisa trading secara alami, kamu telah menguasai semuanya, kamu bisa Dancing with the Market, kemanapun arah market berjalan, kamu telah open di posisi yang benar, jadi kamu tinggal melihat profit kamu bergerak dari 2 digit ke 3 digit.

Inilah level puncak dari seorang trader, inilah level utopia, kamu telah menguasai emosi kamu dan kini kamu trading dengan account yang terus membesar tiap harinya dari kumulatif profit yang kamu peroleh.

Kamu akan jadi bintang di trading chat room, dan orang-orang akan mendengarkan apa yang kamu katakan, kamu kenal dengan pertanyaan mereka, karena kamu ada diposisi mereka 2 tahun yang lalu.
Kamu akan memberikan saran bagi mereka, namun kamu tahu bahwa kebanyakan dari mereka tidak akan mendengarkannya karena mereka masih trader level 1.

Kamu tidak akan mempunyai masalah financial lagi, kamu mampu membeli semua benda yang tersedia untuk dijual, kamu bisa membeli pulau dan trading disana asalkan ada jaringan internet, kamu bisa pindah ke hotel bintang 5, dan menjadi penghuni tetap disana.

Kamu mempunyai penghasilan seperti seorang superstar, kamu bisa membuat buku sendiri, kamu bisa trading dengan margin yang tanpa batas, dan account kamu akan berlipat-lipat dari account awal.

Hanya 3% trader yang bisa mencapai level ini.

Sekarang kamu bisa dengan bangga berkata " SAYA SEORANG TRADER".

Improving Your Trading Performance

Improving Your Trading Performance: The Single Most Important Step You Can Take

A chess player analyzing the board for the next move; fighter pilots maneuvering their planes to get a lock on enemy aircraft; a baseball player tracking the release of the ball from the pitcher’s arm; ballet dancers executing their leaps; an oncologist diagnosing a rare form of cancer; a bodybuilder sculpting a small muscle group to achieve symmetry: all of these are examples of performance activities. They are also examples of fields that have been widely researched in the past two decades, uncovering important clues as to the factors that create successful performance.

This research raises fascinating questions: What makes expert performers different from less successful ones? Is expert performance a function of inherited personality traits and skills, or can it be cultivated in the proper environments? Which techniques has research found to dramatically improve performance? Will the performance-enhancing techniques that benefit chess grandmasters and Olympic athletes also assist traders? The book I am currently writing will tackle all these questions and more. This article has a more modest aim: It will draw upon research studies with chess experts to identify the one most important thing traders can do to accelerate their development.


Trading as a Performance Activity

Not all trading is a performance activity, of course. A computer can be programmed to enter, manage, and exit positions, but the computer does not perform in the same way as the athlete, dancer, or fighter pilot. Performance, in the psychological sense, begins with the human element in competition. Humans choose when to take action and when to refrain; they can select various courses of action on different occasions and can invent new strategies when needed. The trading computer does not have good days and bad days—only profitable ones and unprofitable ones. Human traders can perform poorly even if they make money, and they can have good days even when they’re in the red. That is because performance is a function of the chosen actions of performers, the correctness of those choices, and the skill with which the actions are carried out. Once an element of discretion enters into trading, it becomes a performance activity: one in which outcomes are dependent upon the choices of the performer.

There are several common features of performance activities:

* They can be executed well or poorly. Activities that are performed well on a consistent basis require a high degree of skill. A lucky outcome, such as winning a lottery, is not a skilled performance.
* There are individuals who can be identified as expert performers. With very rare exception, expert performers are ones who have developed their talents over time. Most expert performers undergo specialized training to cultivate their talents.
* They require a specialized knowledge base. The knowledge may be the “how-to” knowledge of a gymnast or the research knowledge of a scientific researcher. To perform well in a field, a person must master the information and skills specific to that field.

Trading, as a performance activity, has much in common with chess. It is competitive, requiring a high degree of concentration and strategy. It also features a limited number of actions that, in combination, create a large array of possible strategies and actions. This makes both activities easy to learn, but difficult to master. Chess can be played in lightning fashion, with very little time between moves, or it can allow players many minutes to plan moves—or even days (postal chess). Trading can also be conducted on a very short-term basis or can be planned and executed over hours or days. These similarities make chess an excellent starting point for examining the performance dynamics of trading, especially since chess is one of the performance fields most studied by researchers.


The Performance Ingredients of Chess

A well-replicated finding in chess research is that the memory processes of experts are different from those of non-experts. One intriguing set of studies took chessboard arrangements from a past tournament games and briefly showed them to expert players and novices. Afterward, the expert chess players were able to recall the positions of many more pieces than the novices. When the two groups were shown chessboards with randomly arranged pieces, however, their recall of the positions of the pieces was quite limited. The researchers’ conclusion was that experts do not have better memories than non-experts; rather, they have better memories for meaningful relationships among chess pieces. Instead of remembering where each individual piece was on the board, the experts viewed the board as clusters of pieces and remembered these. When the board was randomly arranged, there were no meaningful clusters of pieces and the experts had no effective means for encoding their information.

How do expert chess players gain this ability to perceive meaningful patterns among pieces? Because chess players are given ratings based upon their tournament play, it is relatively easy to compare experts (masters and grandmasters) with less accomplished players. When a variety of factors are incorporated into multiple regression equations to predict chess ratings, two stand out as highly significant:

1. The number of books owned – Research conducted by Neil Charness and colleagues finds that the correlation between books owned by chess players and their current performance ratings was .53.
2. The cumulative number of hours spent in practice – Those same researchers found that the correlation between the amount of time spent in practice and current performance ratings was .60.

To appreciate these findings, it is necessary to understand what chess books are and how they are used. These texts typically break the game down into components (opening, endgame, defenses, etc.) and present historical games from tournaments, along with annotation from an expert author. Readers do not merely skim over these games; they learn specific opening or defensive sequences and then see how these were utilized in actual games. They recreate those games on their own boards and carefully play through the positions, so that they can see what the expert players saw. They also play through alternate sequences to observe where these might lead.

Interestingly, chess experts do not have significantly more chess-playing experience than non-experts. Rather, a higher percentage of the experience of experts is spent in the systematic practice of various facets of the game. Non-experts tend to spend a higher proportion of their time in games against similarly-skilled opponents. This experience neither exposes the learner to the moves of experts, nor does it provide time for a careful review of moves, exploration of alternate lines, etc. In the Charness work, the correlation between solitary practice and chess ratings is almost twice as high as the correlation between practice with others and ratings. This is because solitary practice with chess books allows learners to obtain chess knowledge in context. Instead of focusing on the moves of an opponent, learners encounter—again and again—those meaningful configurations of pieces that appear in the games of experts.


Enhancing Trading Performance

Students of trading are at a huge disadvantage relative to students of chess. Chess books document the performance of centuries of experts in actual tournament situations. Because of this, chess students can create and play through almost any challenging situation imaginable, drawing upon the accumulated wisdom of experts. Trading possesses no such database. Trading books, unlike chess texts, are not annotated compilations of the trading decisions of objectively rated experts. One cannot use trading books to recreate trading sessions or to systematically explore trading decisions and their alternatives. Chess books lend themselves to independent deliberative practice; trading books present ideas outside the context of actual trading.

As a result, traders tend to spend little time in the systematic practice that is the single greatest predictor of chess expertise—not to mention expertise in music, athletics, and dance. This violates a principle from the performance research that is so striking that it might even be called a law:

In every performance field, the development and maintenance of expertise requires a high ratio of time spent in practice relative to time spent in actual performance.

Athletes spend far more time working out, practicing, and scrimmaging than actually playing in competitive events. The same is true for chess masters, professional dancers, fighter pilots, and racecar drivers. Our analysis of chess expertise helps to explain this law. Only significant time spent in absorbing winning and losing chess enables players to internalize the patterns of play that distinguish experts from non-experts. The trader who spends more time trading than practicing trading is like the golfer who spends more time playing rounds with buddies than on the driving range, putting green, and in lessons. We all know golfers like that, and they are not the ones who make their living on the PGA tour.

This then leads us to the single most important step you can take to become an expert trader:

The expert trader needs to be able to review and re-experience markets and systematically rehearse facets of trading performance: entering, managing, and exiting positions.

Note that what I am suggesting is NOT paper trading. Paper trading is usually a following of the market in real time, accompanied by simulated trading decisions. Such paper trading does not allow traders to replay market action, review their decisions, test out alternatives, etc. It is this re-experiencing that cements learning, and it requires a database of market days similar to the database of tournament games utilized by chess books.

Think of each trading session as a chess game, and each game as a contest between two expert players named “Bull” and “Bear”. Every short-term swing in the market is a move by Bull or Bear that ultimately leads either to a victory for one of them or a draw. In tracking the moves of Bull and Bear, we can pause the match at any point and observe how each player exploits the weak moves of the other. With the aid of an electronic database that collates similar trading sessions, we can even explore how alternate moves by each side produce different outcomes. Moreover, we can play and replay the “games” (and their similar variants), seeing if our simulated trading decisions accurately reflect our reading of the strengths and weaknesses of the players’ positions.

How could we create such a database? Two methods stand out at present, and my hope is that software vendors will create even more:

1. Replay. Some programs, such as Ensign and e-Signal, allow users to replay market data at varying rates of speed. This permits repetition of a market day, so that paper trading can be accompanied by review and fresh practice. Programs that allow users to save and replay tick data are especially valuable, as this creates a library of trading sessions akin to the collections of chess games found in books.
2. Taping. Videotaping of one’s trading screens allows for unlimited review of market action and one’s trading decisions. It is not too far-fetched to imagine video-taping of simulated trading from video-taped data, creating feedback loops for learning. Over time, collections of these tapes form a library for study that would allow traders to practice trading almost any kind of market imaginable.

If this analysis has merit, then most of the services offered to traders in the popular media have limited value. Self-help techniques, exhortations regarding discipline, didactic presentations of patterns, and general rules and advice do not turn chess novices into experts, and there is no reason to believe they will advance the performance curve for traders. Knowledge and practice—and especially the direct experience of knowledge-in-practice—are the keys to the acquisition of expertise.

We commonly hear the statistic that 90% of all traders ultimately fail. If this is so, it is not because they lack the right personality traits, indicator patterns, or software programs. Rather, they have failed to structure their learning to facilitate expertise. This is one of the most important lessons we can learn from the decades of research and hundreds of studies on the topic of performance. The path to our greatness lies not only in performing, but in the systematic work we put into performance. The next great advance in trading technology, I believe, will be the creation of dynamic learning environments that serve as the electronic equivalent of chess books. The learning platforms we rig for ourselves today will pale in comparison to tomorrow’s technology, but that matters little to those pursuing self-development. The single most important step you can take, Ayn Rand realized, is to fight for tomorrow, so that you might live in it today.