Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! Golden Rule 4 – Do your exercises before you compete in the Olympics! One of the best swimmers is Michael Phelps. He broke several world records and took part in international swimming events for over a decade. Albert Einstein is known as the creator of the theory of relativity and he won the nobel prize in Physics in 1921. Now think about all the time both men needed to invest to do their exercises in swimming and thinking! I don’t know what would happen if somebody would decide to send Albert Einstein to the Olympics, but I doubt that he could beat Michael Phelps in the water. And probably Michael Phelps has never considered to win the nobel prize in any science profession. If you want to become good at anything, you already know that you need to train and invest the time it takes. According to the book “Outliers” (written by Malcom Gladwell) the time you need to invest to become a master in any topic is 10000 hours. The 10000 hour rule is based on a study from Anders Eriksson, a swedish psychologist who is an expert in the topic of expert performance. If you want to learn the piano, you need to do regular exercises. If you want to become a good runner, you need to run on a regular basis. It doesn’t help to play the piano just once. And it doesn’t help that you already know how to run. You need to do it, again and again and improve your skills. But when it comes to trading, most people think that they can skip the exercises – because their broker doesn’t demand it. In fact your broker makes good money with rookies who think that they can trade like world class champions. I have gotten emails from people who were convinced that they have the best system in the world – and they have made their decision based on a handful of trades! I don’t even consider something with less than one thousand trades to be a system. I have seen systems fail after over 10000 trades, so I am careful with what I do. Most people are security oriented, they never would drive a car with their eyes closed. But when it comes to trading, they think they can do it without any practice. They just look at a few candles, make a decision and trade huge amounts of real money, because they think it is the right thing to do. That is like learning to juggle with running chainsaws instead of balls! A big loss is what happens sooner or later – and now they can’t believe it! But when you think about it, you probably have spent years in school. Your teacher started with simple and basic things, like learning the alphabet. It took you some time to learn the meaning of each letter before you could write an essay or read a whole book. And you also needed to learn the digits and the basic math rules, before you could understand floating type multiplications. Most people spend over ten years in school before they even start to learn a profession. And that takes a few additional years on top. For profitable, automated trading you need to find a way to improve your results based on things that can be measured. It isn’t important, how you feel. It isn’t important what you believe the price will do. It is about results, that can be improved until you make profits on a consistent basis. Most of the time that is testing things and comparing results with other results. Fortunately that is not very time consuming in automated trading, because you can test a whole year within a few minutes. The backtesting process will tell you how your system would have behaved – you don’t need to do squats to exercise. But you need to have the patience and invest the time to find out what works – and what doesn’t work BEFORE you lose all your trading money! And to do that, you need to define what exactly you want to do – BEFORE you need to do it with real money. Because when it comes to real money, people start to bend their own rules to avoid a loss. In my opinion trading is very hard for average people,