Can you Learn to be a Successful Trader?

Can you learn to be a successful trader? Do you have it? Can you be taught it?

Wasn’t that the question that Richard Dennison and Bulloch argued back in the early 90’s? I can’t answer that question because I don’t know. It’s just something inside me. How that seed was planted? I don’t know. My family has a history in aviation, my father was a quantum’s captain for thirty years, my grandfather was in the Australian Air Force and my brother started off as a pilot. I guess in primary school a pilot is what I wanted to do. I played with planes my whole junior year. For some unknown reason, I went into the financial market. I’m the only one of our family that have ever done that historically, so I don’t know where it came from. I just think I was in the right place at the right time to get offered a job in a stockbroking firm.

Mind you, it was just pushing paper. It just triggered something that said, “Hey, I like this. This is good”. I don’t know. I guess the same question could be asked to people like Richard Dennis and Eckhart and Salem Abraham, and all these kinds of guys out there. Where does it come from? I’m not sure that they’d be able to give you an answer, as opposed to someone who really wants to trade. I didn’t set out to trade. It wasn’t like I was at school.

I get phone calls now from young university students who are eighteen, twenty-one, and that’s what they want to do –they want to trade. That’s their goal; they want to learn how to trade. I’m not sure if that’s enough though. I think it has to be inside you to want to do it if you like it.

Let’s take golf as an example, I don’t think you can start out by saying I’m going to be a Tiger Woods. I don’t think you can make yourself from nothing, to a Tiger Woods. I believe Tiger Woods has some kind of innate skill or talent buried deep within. I’m not sure it can be replicated if you’d like. This is why those guys are the top of their field, and then you’ve got another twenty-five thousand aspiring professionals out there who live in the back of their car, and maybe earn five hundred bucks each year.