Quote from: jeraldskie11 on November 15, 2023, 12:59:58 PM

Quote from: _act_ on November 15, 2023, 10:44:18 AM

It is better not to have confidence and not trade if not following the trading rules.

If you're a newbie, confidence is the result of backtesting your strategy.
If you're an intermediate trader, consistency will give you more confidence.
If someone says that he is confident but didn't backtest and encounter many loses, he probably lying to himself.

Your level of confidence will decrease as you lose more money trading.

I fully agree with all these statements. On this post there are many answers mixed: some people giving advice as investors... others as traders.

But is important these kind of posts for newbies and for intermediates traders that find themshelves on a lost pattern (maybe there are not intermediate at all). I would like to point, based in my experience, what is needed to begin to trade for newbies with some confidence:

1. Read books and avoid paid groups, paid courses, youtube videos and so on. Reading books about trading has been the most fulfilling experience for me.
2. Understand the market via backtesting the asset, commodity, forex or crypto you want to trade.
3. Again, backtest an strategy that you think might work. At least with 10.000 candles, preferred 20.000 or more. (be happy to design strategies with a win ratio of 40%)
3. Don't trade in the first years with small timeframes (5m, 10m, 15m...). Better trade in 1h, 4h, 1d...
4. Paper trade during a period of 100 trades at least. That means live trading with a demo account or just writing the calls you would have taken, and why.
5. Make a log in excel of all of your trades, including emotions while opening, surfing and closing the trade.
6. Don't leverage more than 3x-4x, and be constant with the same leverage for all your positions on that pair.

To finish I want to share a sentence from Peter Brandt's book "Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader" that is so true: Like it or not, buy-and-hold strategies are a joke. Every decision you make in life represents a trade-off. Everything is a trade. Everything is a gamble.

Any strategy should outperform all crypto bullmarket-bearmarket.