In my opinion there are three skills that every trader has to develop in order to be a successful live trader.
1. Technical skills and awareness of the environment that he is in.
2. Mental skills (those are most difficult to obtain because you can develop them trough experience and self-evaluation).
3. Concentration (treating your trading as a business).
The difference between trading with your own money and paper money is huge. First of all when you are trading paper money every decision that you make is without any stress or fear. The decision that you take with real money is under pressure and fear. That makes a huge difference in the end results. I will give you my persona experience as a live trader. I ve been trading forex for 4 5 years mostly with paper money. Lately ive been achieving some consistent results in the trader contest and i decided to open a live account. I must tell you that trout the first week i made every rocky mistake that a trader can make: over leveraging, not following the trade plan, not being able to wait long enough so my position can unfold, placing too tight of a stop. I couldn’t sleep some nights due to stress, i had sweaty palms almost always. Those mistakes and experiences led me to loosing 50% of my account in 3 weeks. So my point is that in order to obtain the mental skills that a trader needs my theory is that the rocky must lose some significant portion of his/ her capital and reevaluate his approach to be successful in trading.
You can’t expect to achieve the same results as in your paper trading in the live trading mediately.
If you deposit small amount of money you will get reckless with the trading. If you deposit a large amount of money you will feel fear and stress all the time. So experience is the key..
My advice for beginning traders is to deposit lets say 10 to 30 % of their own money in an account and start trading. Place your account stop at 50% stop loss. If you hit that stop try to reevaluate your situations and fix your mistakes. Because you will make all the beginners mistakes belive me. Knowing the rules is the first step. Actually disciplining yourself to follow those rules is the hard part. And please lower your expectations of your performance. If you start trading with the mindset that you will double your money every week you are doomed to fail.
