It is important that you know you strengths and weakness.

Have you thought about this thing – do you consciously understand what is your best niche in trading?

We are all different people. We process information in different ways. The only way to sustain ongoing learning process is to find trading niche that suits your personality.

They say – talent is the key for success. I would say – the key to success is «talent + environment».

To become master trader, you need to process huge amount of information, master all nuances and details of price action before you obtain intuitive skills. This is hard work, but it absolutely doesn’t feel like work if you’re doing something interesting and emotionally rewarding. This occurs when your natural abilities to process information are involved. Our learning curve accelerates significantly if we are operating inside our niche.

I will share with you small check-list that will help you better understand what your trading niche is.

Consider answering simple questions

Do I make tend to make decisions by analyzing data or by «gut feel»?

It’s not even about decision making process in trading, it’s about life in whole. For example, how you decide – what car or computer to purchase? Do you patiently explore feedback from some special internet resources? Or you just follow your impulse and pick what you «feel» is good?

It’s nothing wrong about that. This is how we process information and each of us has dominating style of perception as well as reaction to outside information.

In trading, «gut feelers» will be better at pattern recognition. Price action trading is not a science - from time to time, market creates short-term imbalances and elusive opportunities that can’t be recognized by traditional technical analysis – there’s no way to measure «aggressiveness» of the market or «lack of conviction». Yet people with strong gut feel and intuition can read price action quite effectively. Their learning curve accelerates when they start master some patterns and setups observing nuances and details of limited number of setups.

You can hear from this type of trader: «Here market is strong, here market is weak» - that’s how they view things, they will not be able to explain it. «It’s just obvious» - you will hear from them, after you will ask them to explain their best trades.

Other traders will need research and solid rationale beyond their trading decisions. They will be more capable to deal with building trading systems, measuring and optimizing parameters, dealing with statistics and so on.

For example, I tend to be more «gut feeler» (though I have solid trading approach, once (several years ago) I was trying to master some «mechanical trading systems» under supervision of experienced trader. It was a complete disaster, I’ve done a lot of mistakes, was emotionally sucked out and lost significant amount of money.

It was tough lesson for me – I had to switch back to my preferred trading style and master it. Then, things have become fine.