History is not going to repeat itself the way it did for my mentors and colleagues.

Investment into the trading business is going to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. If you are doing things by hand, you are putting yourself in a very disadvantaged position.

You can't work orders on the floor anymore. There is no floor. How's that for a development?!

Another example is the risk per trade in contemporary trading. Back in the 70s and 80s, it wasn't uncommon to risk as much as 2% per trade! That would be madness in today's environment, especially if you want to get an allocation from a global macro fund or if you want to work for a real prop trading firm.

[A real prop trading firm will give you funds to run without your needing to add your own capital and you'll be able to take the risk home with you overnight and over the weekend, for example.]

Take the humanity out of your trading. If you are looking at charts for subjective interpretation, more and more you'll be competing against trading machines that are "trained" to beat you. If you think trading is unfair already, in my opinion it's going to get worse.

Whereas I think you should strengthen your sense of self through yoga and meditation, at the same time I think you should begin to extract yourself out of the trading equation by coming to understand that you are the weakest link in your trading.

To put it in context, I think even if you had the self-knowledge and awareness of HH The Dalai Lama, you should still develop a set of computerized trading rules and manage risk systematically.

Two good books on yoga are Light On Yoga: The Bible of Modern Yoga by BKS Iyengar and Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness by Erich Schiffmann. Disclosure: Erich is a long time friend and my yoga teacher of 20 years.