The power of persistence

There’s one quality I believe that separates successful traders from the unsuccessful.

This quality alone could pretty much mean 50% of the success.

It’s persistence.

In fact, I was reminded of the power of persistence just recently.

Let me share with you what exactly happened, and what insight this can bring to you:

A few months ago, Andrew and I started preparing a new cutting-edge product, a special “Advanced Swing Strategies Workshop”.

Something, that a lot of our Breakout Strategies Masterclass students have asked about.

So, what I basically did, was, I took our best hedge-fund know-how on developing high-quality swing strategies, that we have acquired so far. Including some “secret” techniques, I’ve never shared before. And then I assembled everything into very specific, precise steps, so other traders can implement everything as quickly and seamlessly, as possible.

And when I finished, I handed everything to Andrew so he could test it and prove it himself.

Now, an unexpected surprise happened:

Although in our hedge fund we developed hundreds of high-quality swing strategies with the exact same know-how I handed to Andrew…

…unfortunately…

…he was not getting ANY results whatsoever! Actually, he was getting extremely poor results, completely different to what we were expecting.

I was perplexed.

It didn’t make any sense to me.

Of course, I immediately triple-checked everything. I even confirmed with my hedge fund team, to make sure that THIS was exactly what we had used to develop hundreds of our own strategies.

Yet, Andrew was still having no success.

After quite some time (months) of going back and forth with ideas of what the issue could be, and not progressing, I started feeling helpless. To be honest, I was almost ready to quit the idea of this workshop. I was truly confused by these results, and had no idea what to do next!

But fortunately, the more frustrated I got, the more Andrew showed incredible persistence.

He persisted that it had to be just some very small detail. Something we must have overlooked.

He persisted to test ALL of the components and variations of the instructions individually.

He persisted to break the special ‘Advanced Swing Smart Code’ we prepared into small pieces. And then test each piece separately, comparing the results.

Now, of course, this all seemed like an overwhelming job to me.

And indeed, it was.

It literally took MONTHS.

Months of disappointing results, again and again.

Months of not progressing anywhere.

Months of being left in total confusion (as it really wasn’t making any sense to either of us).

But Andrew kept going with incredible persistence….

Until he succeeded.

Until he found ‘that one small detail’, that yes, we (I) had overlooked.

And now the results are SO much better!

So, two points emerged from this experience:

1.

Despite endless time and effort, persistence usually pays off. Especially in trading. The more we persist with something, the higher the chance of success. If we don’t persist enough, sooner or later we give up. Trading is not an easy business. It is full of hurdles and unexpected U-turns. Persistence can be one of the decisive factors between success and failure.

2.

Especially in trading, we need to develop more persistence and resilience than in any other professions. This whole experience reminded me how true this is. During my trading career, I have worked with hundreds, if not even thousands of traders. And one of the common patterns I witnessed, again and again, was traders jumping from one trading idea to another too quickly. Or from one trading direction to another trading direction. Or from one development framework to a different one. Too fast. With too little focus. Too little depth. And that means too little persistence.

So, persistence DOES matter.

Always make sure that you know exactly what you want to achieve in your trading. And then persist with that until it’s done.

Don’t flinch an inch.

Yes, it will require a lot of time and effort, but at the end of the day, it will very likely pay off.

Sometimes even in a big way.

Happy trading!

Tomas

P.S.

To the Breakout Masterclass Students: The Advanced Swing workshop is still in development. We’re currently working on some cool surprises, that we plan to include. We will hopefully be able to share some more details soon.