Forex Trading Articles

MI CASA ES SU CASA

By Dick Thompson for Forexmentor
©2010, Forexmentor.com, May, 2010

While in Panama in March, I visited a garden with the name of Mi Jardin Es Su Jardin. The name is obviously a take-off of the expression of hospitality “mi casa es su casa”.

By some process of free association (only my shrink understands this), I began thinking about trading and how, as developing traders, we all tend to search for a perfect trading system. More specifically, we wander about trying this and that, drooling over advertisements that promise many pips with Forex XYZYX system that can be ours for only $xxxx and so on. They all promise that their system will work for us and make us rich. They are telling us “mi casa es su casa”.

Through many travels in Latin America, living with a number of families, I  have come to believe that this saying is well founded in reality. The people south of the border do open their homes to guests; they are wonderful folks to spend time with. They make good on their promise. But, through my travels in the world of trading, I have also come to believe that with regard to trading systems, the saying is not well founded. As a matter of fact, it is generally fraudulent.

Having said that, though, some of these systems, methods, trading ideas are worth something, but only if we first understand some realities. We must accept that mi casa is simply mi casa. It cannot and will not become su casa. Why? Well, because these systems were invented by someone who spent a lot of time developing, testing, living with, and suffering with them. They likely went through some very rough times and probably lost a lot of money (real or demo, it makes no difference) in the process. At the end, they learned how to use it and perhaps even to make money with it. It truly became their system, they own it; or if you will, mi casa. But, unfortunately, despite all the hype that they attach to their sales pitches, it cannot easily become ours; not without a lot of effort equivalent to what they themselves put into it. It might be possible for it to become a reliable system for us, but we must tweak it, live with it, suffer with it, trade it for a long time. Then, perhaps we might truly own it and call it our own. At the end of the day, though, it will probably not look much like what it did when we first got our hands on it.

Experience has shown that we are not likely to spend all that effort. After a short time, we will abandon the new system as not workable, because we can’t make a lot of pips right away. So we go trudging after another system, calling the first one a fraud, or something worse.

My take on all of this is that we tend to approach the business of learning to trade in the wrong way. Instead of trying to jump in and find a system that will make us pips, we should be learning how the markets work, risk management, trade management, how price moves. In other words, we should be learning how to trade. As Chris Lori has said, we must become “Independent thinkers”. Or as Jim Twentyman said many years ago, “Defy human nature—do the work yourself”. And in my opinion, it will be a much more valuable expenditure of time and effort to do that work on the skills mentioned above rather than on trying to tweak a system developed by another trader. If we truly learn to trade, we can trade any system, any methodology that appeals to us. We will own it. Then it will be mi casa.

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