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I'm starting the thread to encourage participation on this subject. Many people say you need "10,000 hours" of hands-on trading experience before you can become adept enough on the subject to be in a position to be any good at it.
Most people who work 40 hour work weeks in a "day job" work approximately 2,000 hours a year. This equates to roughly 5 years of experience to equal the 10,000 hour mark, if you put in 40 hours a week with 2 weeks off per year.
some thoughts about:
1) If one is working on ONE instrument - to get in touch witch that special instrument behaviour
you need a lot of experience
2) looking for many instruments - the "feeling" for ONE instrument time will be mutliplied by instruments
SO:
If one gets a feeling of price movements in ONE instrument - one can cut down experience hours...
if not - a 10K screen hours on different instruments does NOT prevent from trading losses.
My 2 cents - concentrate on ONE instrument you believe on
I think its bang-on - as a minimum! Expecting the dream for less is foolhardy in the extreme. Most jobs can be learned in that same kind of time-frame, but most jobs do not have the psychological inside out turns that trading does. I'd say (from 13yrs and still surviving) that doubling the number is not a problem either.
Right now is a classic example, the markets are being held in a stalling pattern and traders will be blowing up accounts all over the world trying to force trades to happen that are not yet present with a good r/r. To learn when not to trade let alone how to trade takes a very long time indeed.
is probably a good evaluative criteria to gauge when an individual might start to gain increasing profitability and consistency. The really bright, really assertive can do it sooner, yet keep in mind that there are no barriers to entry, so many that should not even consider it, do give trading a whirl.
It might not be fair though to consider "top performance"
Makes sense; not only for trading, but for any skill/craft one is learning and trying to master.
Some people can do it will less hours, others require more - a very interesting book touching on this subject is: "The Dip" from Seth Godin.
I am not sure 10,000 is the magical number, I was convinced of something like 4500...
But either way the idea is there It requires lots of commitment, and will power; time + energy to say the least.
Ask any worldwide champion about his journey to the top, they are all similar fom chess players to the most extreme competitions you wish to think of (including trading of course)
Successful people will do what unsuccessful people won't or can't do!
IMO 10,000 is probably in the ball park. As @wldman suggests the figure no doubt varies according to what talents the trader already possesses and how quickly s/he is able to acquire new skills--less for the gifted or more for folks who have a lot of unlearning to do (bad habits, psychological issues, unproductive personality traits).
While it may seem those who obsess about things (tend to work far more than 40 hours / week) ought to be able to get into "the zone" sooner than 5 years I'm not sure that's the case 100% of the time. IMO for example psychological issues responsible for obsessive and often compulsive behaviour, the resolution of which may have nothing to do with trading experience, can cause us to repeat the same bad behaviour over and over--expecting different results, as the joke goes--stuck in a rut for a very long time before we finally snap out of it.
And what about the traders whose charts are constantly changing? I mean different specialty bar types, different indicators, and thus different setups?
Is the 10,000 hours cumulative across all these differences? Or does one need 10,000 hours on a vastly similar approach to be an expert in that approach?
How different is trading one "chart template" with one bar type, and one set of indicators compared with a different "chart template" of a completely different bar type and indicators?
What about varying methodologies such as trading divergences vs breakouts, or trading extremes countertrend vs trend following and trend continuation? Do you need 10,000 hours of each?
Prop shops give traders 12 weeks of training & then let them work SIM till they get good enough to be let loose on 1 or 2 lots. Some people are there on week 12 and some never get there.
3 months, not 5 years.
There wouldn't be ANY professional traders anywhere if it took 5 years of full time commitment to get profitable.
Think about it people, how would a firm be able to survive if if they had to pay people for 5 years before they got a return? How would prop traders on a stipend of $750 a month survive for 5 years on that pittance before they made enough money to buy a few new shirts, or eat.
What is it that occurs at hour 10,000 that is so special? Why not 5403 or 1726 or 8983?
It's just a myth perpetuated on teh interweb in my opinion.
I would tend to agree with Dionysus. If you want to become the next Warrren Buffet then maybe you'd need 10000+ hours but learning a basic intraday method should not take more than 3 months. Obviously, if you want to program your own tools and reinvent the wheel then it is another game.