It is my firm belief that trading is a learned skill and not one that is necessarily naturally born. While many people feel that they have some natural ability to read the markets, I would strongly suggest that the only way you get to improve your feel for the way in which markets move is by putting in screen time.

In many ways, I think trading is like a sport. Pick up a golf club for the first time and I would think that you wouldn’t be an amazing golfer. It takes time and practice

Trading is the same.

We have to remember, that anyone can find a winning trade. You have a 50% chance of taking a trade right now and it turning into a winner.

So finding a winning trade is easy. Hitting one good golf shot on your first couple of tries is also doable. Doing either consistently well is far tougher.

With that in mind, I always feel the best way to learn to trade is by putting in the hours in front of the screen.

I’m at my desk two hours before the open and until an hour after the close.

But I still want more time to keep improving. So something I’ve started to use to get more quality practice time to improve my skills is visualization.

Power of Visualization

There’s a famous study, that tested people shooting free throws in basketball. There were three groups in the study.

1. One group practised shooting free throws each day for a month.
2. The next group visualized themselves shooting free throws for a month.
3. The final group did no practice.

The remarkable thing was the two groups, the ones that practised and the ones that visualized practising – both had similar levels of improvement in their results. While the third group who did no practice showed no improvement.

That’s quite a remarkable study and shows the power of visualization in developing a skill.

Effectively you can use visualization to practice and increase your screen time and good habits in the process. Incredible really.

Next week, I’ll be back with an exercise we can use to improve our trading with visualisation.