Unlimited Trading Opportunities

Unlimited Trading Opportunities

In the 1980s, "Market Wizard" Tom Baldwin took a small stake and traded it into a fortune to become one of the most prolific traders in history. It's a dream of many, yet few realize such profitability. What separates the winning trader from the masses that feed their accounts year after year? One factor is a strong belief in unlimited trading opportunities.

To become a winning trader, it's vital that you expand your vision of what you can do. You must truly believe that the opportunities in the markets are endless. Many traders, however, think that trading opportunities are scarce. People may hold scarcity beliefs for a variety of reasons. It's useful to identify which beliefs you hold and acknowledge how such beliefs influence your expectations as to what you can achieve as a trader. For many people, money and other financial resources are indeed scarce. They may have grown up in tough economic times or in a family where money was hard to come by. These early experiences may influence their expectations as adults about the value of money, and the difficulty of obtaining it. For other people, scarcity beliefs reflect political or cultural factors. Members of some cultures and societies, for example, believe in the concept of the "limited good," a belief that resources are so limited that one person's gain is the result of another person's loss. Indeed, in the markets, when you make a profit, it usually means someone else has taken a loss. Scarcity beliefs reflect significant personal and moral beliefs, and each person must decide where he or she stands regarding these beliefs. Depending on the source of these beliefs, they may be easy to change ("I grew up poor, but that doesn't mean I need to stay poor") or difficult ("I don't want to gain at the expense of others, but perhaps I can donate some of my profits to charity so I can feel a little better about winning").

Regardless of the source of scarcity beliefs, you can't deny the clear and distinct disadvantage of holding them: they can be very self-limiting. It is useful to believe that there are abundant opportunities in the market to make money. If you don't believe in endless opportunities for profit, then you will not expend the effort needed to become a profitable trader. That said, it's also useful to remember that beliefs in abundance are not enough.

Even after you convince yourself that market opportunities are abundant, you must start the hard work of actually becoming a profitable trader. You must tirelessly search for market opportunities. You can't expect profitable trading ideas to fall into your lap. If trading were that easy, everyone who tries to trade would be profitable. Only a select few see profitability, however. What's their secret? Winning traders continually try to find new ways to make a profit. That might mean reading through dozens of annual reports every night. It could mean monitoring top company executives to see if they are uncharacteristically trying to buy or sell their company stock. It may mean making contacts with experts who study the company and its management in order to get an idea as to how the company is running. Are shipments made on time? Can new products reach the market as planned? Answers to these fundamental questions may help you forecast the stock price of a company.

In the end, abundance beliefs are only part of the picture. You must also search for market opportunities. They are out there, but you have to do whatever you can to find them, even if it takes hours during the trading day and during off hours. But there's no reason to limit yourself. It may take time and energy, but the more you can entertain a vision of yourself as a winning trader, and do whatever it takes to get there, the more likely you'll realize your dreams of achieving enduring financial success.