I like the quote above.

I cannot remember where I heard it, but it points to both the benefit of experience and the problem with it. In trading, certainly experience is a great teacher, but trading is hard enough without having to wait thirty years to get the benefit of thirty years worth of experience.

This is where learning from someone else, Mentoring, can give you the benefit of lessons learned over time, without taking all the time to learn them.

The tricky part here is to learn from someone what they can teach you and, at the same time, build your own unique style of trading that is a reflection of your personality.

You see, you cannot learn to trade just by copying someone else.

When I was in the proprietary trading business, we had two great traders who would allow other traders to sit next to them and copy what the great traders were doing.

Both traders would even announce to the trading room what they were doing as they were doing it.

Unbelievably, none of the traders who sat next to the great traders was ever able to duplicate anything like the success of the great trader.

The fact is that the traders watching barely held their own copying the great trader, even on days when the great trader did spectacularly well.

I believe that this lack of success in copying someone else is because the difference between great success and failure in trading is very small. Successful trading originates within the trader and cannot be the result of rote duplication of what seems to work for someone else.

Getting back to Mentoring, as we do it in our Electronic Trader Mentoring Program, the purpose of our Mentoring Program is to present a framework for a trader to learn and develop his own trading skills. We give traders a starting point. We help correct them when they get off course, and we monitor their progress, but in the end, the trader is the one who finds his own path to success. We just give him a framework and help him to avoid some of the detours in that path to success.

Wishing you success in your trading,
Jeff

For more of Jeff’s articles on trading, go to www.JeffQuinto.com or check out his website for serious traders at www.TransformativeTrading.com.