Someone once told me that women don't make good traders. Many others told me that if one hasn't developed a penchant for trading and investing in the very early years of their life, or for making money, it's highly unlikely they will make it in the field of trading.
And I fall under both categories.
First, I have never been big on matters related to investment. Given a choice, I didn't even want to know my own financial status. I hated filling up my income and expense sheets and I hadn't an inkling what my networth was. The only thing I was very mindful about was not to pay the credit company a single cent in interest, and I use credit cards only to accumulate points (Maybe I have something against the notion of profiting from people who are either not matured, or simply not sensible enough, to not use money they haven't had.)
Secondly - and I'm serious about this - I used to think that people who aspire to accumulate great wealth are self-serving individuals who are not worthy of my respect. I'm not blaming my Dad for inculcating that sort of mindset in me though - he was just concerned that I could grow up materialistic given that things had always come easy for me since I was born.
To cut a long story short, sometime in 2007, something happened and I decided to take a good look at all my assumptions and rules regarding how one is to live his/her life, and question many mental models I had which were limiting my potentials and stifling me. One thing leads to another, and I found myself taking an interest in trading and exploring what seems like a really disastrous career path for someone with my disposition.
"How I trade for a living" by Gary Smith was the first book I read on trading. I had stumbled upon it while browsing at a bookstore. It was sitting on one of those shelves that are hard to reach - says a great deal about how nonconforming it must be. My kind of book. My suspicion was somewhat proven when I flipped to the author's profile page. Without any disrespect to the author, his picture convinced me that this trader (I avoid books on trading that are written by people who don't trade themselves, or have no concrete results to show that I can learn anything from them) probably cares about nothing else but trading. I bought it, because I believe in learning only from people who are obsessed with what they do. Most call that "passion". I prefer to use "obsession", just to make sure I get my point across.
I've since gone on to read many books written by great traders and people who interviewed them. "Reminiscence of a Stock Operator" is one of my favorite. But Gary Smith's is my companion. I've asked a number of traders and none of them have heard of him. Totally explains why he was chucked in an inconspicuous corner of the bookstore.
I suck at doing book review, and I am so glad to find a quality review done by this guy who's helped (not directly, but in his capacity as a software programmer or something along that line...) Smith (who's mathematically challenged...yup, I totally love a trader with a damaged left brain...) to find a way to figure out how much tax he had to pay on the annualized returns the latter was making within a 5-year period.
Check out what he has to say about Gary and his book here
And interestingly, Smith is among those who believed that if you have a passion for something, you probably started showing signs of it as a child. I agree with him whole-heartedly. My brother loved airplanes as a child and he joined the youth flying club when he was in elementary school, and traded his engineering degree (he was 3 months from graduation) for a once-in-a-life time opportunity he couldn't miss to join the SIA. He's now a First Officer. Seabloke loves anything that has a high probability of killing her, and she now helps to run a diving centre after retiring from rescue diving (she especially loves those deep dark caves that are 3000 feet down). Me, I used to want to be a brain surgeon coz I thought it's noble to want to save lives. Then I wanted to be a singer coz...well, i love to sing. Then I just wanted to do something that wouldn't bore me after 3 days of doing it and something that will make me feel like getting out of bed for EVERY morning.
I can't wait to get up to get to my charts and all my trading books now - EVERY morning. So I guess I found my passion. And I want to make a living out of it. Smith and the others might/ would have seen that as an unwise decision on my part. But I've proven time and again to be able to do anything that people say I can't pull off, as long as I'm obsessed in proving them wrong.
But in all honesty, I do love trading. And I don't care about people's opinion and beliefs surrounding the topic in question.
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