My beginnings in FX and a rant about (clueless) newbies

Before December of 2005 I had never even heard of Foreign Exchange. Sure, I had gone on trips and had to exchange my money for other currencies but it had never occurred to me that one could really speculate on the changes in value over time. I had previously given friends some advice on when to buy US$ for a trip based on some pretty much completely unfounded and incomplete fundamental analysis of the international markets but I had never tried my hand at actual trading. My mother-in-law used to say that I would feel very much at home in a trading environment. She offered to set me up with a friend of the family who was doing an internship at the Montreal Stock Exchange. At the time, I thought it was a horribly boring way to spend your day - the type of thing that only real eggheads would do. At the time, I was happier with my nose buried as deep as I could shove it in technical manuals and programming books.

Then I discovered forex.

Since December I have spent every spare moment poring over charts, reading article after article, book after book, forum after forum in a desparate attempt to forge myself into some kind of trader.

So far, I have been doing pretty poorly (I have a current drawdown of about 70%). I am getting better each day however. The main point here is that for now I eat, sleep and breathe FX trading. I am not very good at it but at least I am focussing all of my energy on it and I will get better and better as time goes by.

All too frequently on the fora that I visit I see newbies trying to get "mentors" or worse, trying to get somebody to give them a system that will make them tons of money. The hilarious thing is that these are the same people (or are of the same ilk) that join programming channels/newsgroups/fora and ask which programming language is best or if somebody could "just hack into my ex-girlfriend's hotmail account".

In a way it is kind of insulting to those who are trying hard to make a living doing whatever it is that you dismissively assume can be either handed over or done for you. In the case of hacking hotmail, why would anybody that could do it, do it? More specifically, why would they do it for you? In the case of a trading system, if I have a system that makes me money constantly for little or no risk, why would I give it to you? Who are you? Why should I care? What makes you so special that you can skip all the grueling work I put into learning how to do this and just leapfrog off to making profit (either by hacking a bank or trading a perfect system - which amounts to the same thing)?

People have a misconception about the learning/teaching relationship. Yes, the point is that you don't have to figure out how to learn it for yourself (since I teach you how to learn it). Yes, the point is that you don't need to run down all the rabbit-holes that I did when learning it (although you probably will end up down the most annoying ones). Yes, the point is for you to be able to take some shortcuts on your way to mastery (although some shortcuts are not worth taking since you'll end up having to learn the long way later on).

BUT. Nobody ever learned anything by having a formula given to them.

I remember in high school we learned how to solve quadratic equations. After two years of learning all the stuff required to solve these SOBs by hand, they taught us a method where you calculate "delta", a value (the discriminant of the quadratic) easily obtained in a single operation. This value is then used to figure out not only how many solutions the equation has but also what they are. Pretty sweet shortcut. Only you couldn't really understand why it works without knowing how to solve the quadratic the "long way".

Real learning requires pain and failure in order to solidly anchor the concepts being learned. Pure unbridled success never taught anybody anything. I'm not saying you can't be successful and learn at the same time but if you ask any "star" how they got where they are they will tell you "hard work and a lot of failure".