The times when day trading was reserved only for the privileged few are long gone, as a growing list of available online brokerage platforms make day trading easily accessible to people from all walks of life. Every day, more and more people are flocking to these platforms, and by doing so, they are heavily influencing and reshaping the investing and trading industry. According to the Bloomberg Intelligence reports, individual/retail investors accounted for an all-time high of 24% of US equity trading volume in the first quarter of 2021, a 5% increase from 2020 and a 9% increase from 2019.
Gary Trades, a 27-year-old self-made millionaire and highly successful day trader by profession, says that the ever-increasing number of individual investors is an excellent thing. “The beautiful thing about the stock market is that it started to attract people from all areas and all walks of life,” he says. “What’s even better is the fact that trading also offers a chance for them to earn more money and even achieve financial independence so that they can quit their tedious nine-to-five jobs.”
Gary Trades further explains that even though, at its core, trading is a simple transaction game based on the “buy low, sell high” principle, day trading is much more than finding the right strategy, practicing it, and then making heaps of cash. For him, true success in day trading lies in qualities or traits that the trader has, and he believes that without the following three qualities, every trader is doomed to fail.
Discipline
Gary Trades believes that discipline is the most important quality for any trader to possess. He explains that while it’s easy to be motivated and inspired when things are going well, very few keep their cool during hard times; the ability to maintain discipline in both good times and bad is a rare one. “Lack of discipline leads to making impulsive decisions, and in the trading world, that is a recipe for disaster,” he says.
Adaptability
According to Gary Trades, adaptability is another crucial trait that every trader should have, as no trader will encounter two identical trading days. “It’s true that you need a winning strategy to be a successful trader, but you also need to be quick to change and adapt that strategy to different market conditions, or even switch to a new one,” he says.
Resiliency or Mental Toughness
Finally, resiliency, or the ability to bounce back from failures and mistakes, is another important quality that every day trader should have. As Gary Trades points out, this is a quality that separates successful traders from unsuccessful ones, and it’s a characteristic that most people simply don’t possess. Gary Trades further explains that successful traders are those who bounce back quickly after failing, and that they also ask for help when necessary and realize their mistakes in order to make better decisions in the future.
“Those who don’t possess these qualities simply give up or fail miserably,” he says. “I am not saying that skills or strategies don’t help, but these qualities are just as important if you want to succeed in the trading world.”
