This is the second part of a fascinating article that virtually all successful forex traders go through, I know it reflects my own personal forex journey almost exactly! If you missed the first part of the article you can find it by clicking here: The 5 Phases of A Forex Trader

Step 4 – Conscious Competence

You are making trades whenever your system tells you to.

You take losses just as easily as you take wins

You now let your winners run to their conclusion fully accepting the risk and knowing that your system makes more money than it looses and when you’re on a loser you close it swiftly with little pain to your account

You are now at a point where you break even most of the time – day in day out, you will have weeks where you make 100 pips and weeks where you lose 100 pips – generally you are breaking even and not losing money. You are now conscious of the fact that you are making calls that are generally good and you are getting respect from other traders as you chat the day away. You still have to work at it and think about your trades but as this continues you begin to make more money than you lose consistently.

You’ll start the day on a 20 pip win, take a 35 pip loss and have no feelings that you’ve given those pips back because you know that it will come back again. You will now begin to make consistent pips week in and week out 25 pips one week, 50 the next and so on.

This lasts about 6 months!! 

Step Five – Unconscious Competence

Now we’re cooking – just like driving a car, every day you get in your seat and trade – you do everything now on an unconscious level. You are running on autopilot. You start to pick the really big trades and getting 200 pips in a day doesn’t make you any more excited than getting 1 pip.

You see the newbie’s in the forum shouting ‘go dollar go‘ as if they are urging on a horse to win in the grand national and you see yourself – but many years ago now.

This is trading utopia – you have mastered your emotions and you are now a successful forex trader with a rapidly growing account.

You’re a star in the trading chat room and people listen to what you say. You recognize yourself in their questions from about two years ago. You pass on your advice but you know most of it is futile because they’re teenagers – some of them will get to where you are – some will do it fast and others will be slower – literally dozens and dozens will never get past stage two, but a few will.

Trading is no longer exciting – in fact it’s probably boring you to bits – like everything in life when you get good at it or do it for your job – it gets boring – you’re doing your job and that’s that.

Finally you grow out of the chat rooms and find a few choice people who you converse with about the markets without being influenced at all.

All the time you are honing your methods to extract the maximum profit from the market without increasing risk. Your method of trading doesn’t change – it just gets better – you now have what women call ‘intuition’

You can now say with your head held high “I’m a currency trader” but to be honest you don’t even bother telling anyone – it’s a job like any other.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this journey into a traders mind and that hopefully you’ve identified with some points in here.

Remember that only 5% will actually make it – but the reason for that isn’t ability, its staying power and the ability to change your perceptions and paradigms as new information comes available.

The losers are those who wanted to ‘get rich quick’ but approached the market and within 6 months put on a pair of blinders so they couldn’t see the obvious – a kind of “this is the way I see it and that’s that” scenario – refusing to assimilate new information that changes that perception.

I’m happy to tell you that the reason I started trading was because of the “get rich quick” mindset. Just that now I see it as “get rich slow.”’

If you’re thinking about giving up I have one piece of advice for you….

Ask yourself the question “how many years would you go to college if you knew for a fact that there was a million dollars a year job at the end of it?

Take care and good trading to you all. 

Do you think that this article is correct? What stage are you at? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts and experienceS. It took me 3 years before I became a successful forex trader and I recognise ALL the 5 phases!