We talk about consistency a lot in this blog and on my Youtube channel. Day traders usually use this word in the context of describing consistently profitable traders, people who are capable of making a living by trading stocks. Today, however, I’d like to talk about out it in the context of putting in the hard work and striving to improve continuously.

This blog post is inspired by a conversation with Alex Temiz (check out the video just below this paragraph!), a co-founder of My Investment Club, and an experienced trader who’s been in the business for close to 7 years. Alex and I met up for the 50th episode of B The Trader podcast. When I met him for the first time and told him about my show, he agreed to be on the 50th episode. I think that it was very wise of him to commit to a 50th episode when I just started the show. Successful day traders have people reach out to them all the time for help and advice, and it’s hard to know who’s worth their time and who’s not. And it’s never about how much money the person has made trading. What matters is how seriously this person will take your advice and if they’re going to act on it.

Some people who learn about day trading from an ad they saw online may think of it as a get rich quick scheme. To be fair, some day traders make way more than doctors and lawyers. There is a potential to become rich and famous – look at Tim Sykes and Alex Temiz. But unlike lawyers and doctors who have to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an education, day traders don’t have to commit that many resources to become profitable. However, it will take experience and constant learning to get to the top. Yet, so many traders want to have it all by the end of Year 1. They barely dip their toes into day trading, and they already feel disappointed that they haven’t made much money.

On one hand, I get it. It’s hard to stay humble and grounded in the world where day trading gets represented most loudly by dudes with Lambos. It’s tough to accept that it will be months or even years until you’ll become consistently profitable. But if you’re planning to become a professional day trader, you need to swallow that bitter pill.

Consistency is a routine

Most days are not very profitable, even for experienced traders. Think of them as your typical day in the office. Opportunities that you can take advantage of are not very common. That’s why I recently adapted my trading style. But that doesn’t mean that you get to take a day off any time you don’t have the right situation present itself. On these “average” days, you’re supposed to be doing some groundwork and preparing yourself for the real opportunity. 

It may come as a shock to you, but many experienced consistently successful traders make only several hundred dollars a day. Keep in mind, these are the people whose PnL charts have crossed a million dollars a long time ago. But if you want to keep moving forward, you still have to go through days like that with the right mindset. And when a really big opportunity comes along, you feel confident that you can make the best of it. That’s when the magic happens, and you have the sufficient knowledge, experience, and discipline to capitalize on the opportunity that’s available to literally everybody on the market, yet only a few will make bank thanks to it.

Putting in the full-time effort as opposed to trading full-time

You see, many people confuse “professional” or “profitable” with “full-time”. The truth is, you can trade part-time only and still make great money. What is non-negotiable is your commitment to consistency.

 Being committed means spending extra hours doing research and going over your trading journal. It means fine-tuning your strategies and plans if they stop working. It involves doing the prep work the night before and getting up on time to monitor the pre-market situation.

Day trading is a lot of things, and you certainly don’t need to risk everything you have in order to be successful. However, I’ve heard of people who take out loans in order to open a broker account and quit their jobs to trade full-time, and all I can do is just sincerely hope that they do well. But at the same time, I know that the odds are slim and that it might take a while for them to finish a day, a week, and a month in the green.

Over a year ago, I had to make a decision to go back to my day job in order to keep trading. And even now that I’m doing way better than I did back then, I still have other projects going because I don’t want the added pressure of making a living off of day trading alone.

We all get a little greedy and impatient sometimes

Instead of putting in consistent hard work, many traders get a bit greedy, wanting to make a lot of money very fast. But if you think that only beginner traders deal with that issue, think again. Remember your latest green day. Were you absolutely satisfied with your results, or was there a small part of you that was disappointed that you didn’t make more?

So trust me when I say that day traders of all experience levels deal with the same things in a nutshell. The only thing that really changes is the magnitude of things.

Even disciplined people get sloppy sometimes. And the higher is the risk, the higher is the chance that you may get emotional on your trade. And while a beginner trader may get upset at themselves for not being able to control their trading habits and losing a bit of money, a trader who has scaled multiple times in their career will have a sizeable loss on their hands.

So if you have only started trading recently, and you already hate some aspects of it, brace yourself, because there’s a whole lot more of it coming in the next few years. Problems don’t’ disappear just because you have more experience now. Things can only improve if you commit to working on them and making changes in how you approach what you do.

So consistency is the key if you aspire to become a consistently profitable day trader, only in more ways than you thought. And if you know that you want to be a trader despite all the challenges, feel free to join my community of day traders. I send out a weekly e-mail (no spamming, I promise!) with the highlights from my Podcast show, blog posts like this one, and my Youtube videos.