- Tell us a little bit about you.
I’m Marvin, 29, born and raised in Germany. I’m working as a developer in my regular job and started trading as a side hustle right before the pandemic.
- How long have you been trading?
Almost every day for 2 years, I am a swing Trader.
- Briefly describe your Trading Plan and how it contributes to your success.
My trading plan includes very clear rules on risk management as well as simple daily and weekly checklists, which help me minimize the time needed every day to find potential setups and manage trades. My strategy is based on basic price action, multi-timeframe analysis, and taking advantage of very clear trends.
- Please share with us a challenge you faced in your trading career and how you overcame it.
The biggest challenge was definitely “strategy hopping.” The strategy I’m using now is pretty much the same one I used when I was a couple of months into the process, and it was working back then. However, it didn’t work fast enough for me at that time, which is why I tried 2-3 different approaches in the following months. Of course, that didn’t work fast enough either. After reading several books on trading psychology, I could identify impatience as my main problem and decided to not make any changes to positions once they were open. This took me from break-even to being profitable. The funny thing is, looking back, all these strategies worked when you accept losses are part of the game and stick with it for long enough to let the probabilities play out.
- How did you adjust risk management to your trading personality?
I risk a fixed percentage of my account per trade with a fixed SL and TP, which I will not change once the trade is placed. This makes it easier for me to eliminate false decisions triggered by anxiety or greed and prevents me from having to look at the charts the whole day.
- Describe a key moment in your trading career.
Seeing losing trades as “costs of business” and not necessarily as an error in my strategy provided a lot of peace of mind for me. Of course, this doesn’t mean one should stop looking for ways to improve, but one should do it based on data, not based on an impulse triggered by a losing trade.
- How long does it take for you to become a consistent trader, and what aspects did you change that helped you to become consistent?
It took about 1.5 years, and as mentioned earlier, the biggest accelerator to become profitable was to stop “managing” open positions.
- What is your mental/psychological strength, and how did you develop it?
I think you need to be quite persistent to become profitable. For me, many hours of backtesting helped to increase my confidence in my system and push through the days when things were not going great.
- What was your strategy to successfully pass The5%ers’ First Level?
Choosing the risk per trade carefully and not rushing the process.
- How is trading for the5ers different from trading by yourself?
I think psychologically, and it’s a bit easier to detach from large sums of money you see in your account since you are not trading with your own capital.
- What would you recommend to someone who is just starting with us?
Focus on your win rate, not the money values in your account. If you switch from a 200$ account to a 10k account, losses can be quite intimidating when you see those huge red numbers.
- Share online resources that were/are significant in your trading development. Name and links are appreciated.
I can recommend the books by Mark Douglas. They helped me to understand the psychological side of trading. There is also a video series available on YouTube which summarizes a lot of the content from his books. babypips.com was quite helpful for understanding the market structure, price action, and technical analysis in general.
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