If you study FX, will you really be able to win?
I used to think that FX, like work or sports, would improve if you studied.
If you study, you can get better at FX just as you can at tasks or sports.
I believed this.
Losing is because there are things you don’t know yet.
Not being able to win is because your skills are lacking.
If you think about it that way, the actions are simple.
You just need to study more.
I learned how to read charts, researched methods, and considered entry, stop-loss, and take-profit conditions.
I looked at past charts many times.
How many times would I win under these conditions?
What would happen if I slightly changed the conditions?
I also thought about capital management and psychology.
Every loss reveals a “cause”
When you lose in FX, there are countless points to reflect on.
I couldn’t follow the rules.
I couldn’t wait.
I delayed on the stop-loss.
I took profits too early.
I entered in unnecessary places.
When a cause is found, you feel a bit relieved.
Because,
“I can fix it next time.”
you think.
In fact, there were times when I could win after changing the rules.
There were methods that worked for a while after validation.
Then,
You think,
“If I study, I can improve after all.”
Whether you win or lose, there is something next to do
Here, there was no real end in sight.
If you win,
you study that method further.
If you lose,
you search for another flaw.
In other words,
whether you win or lose, a reason to study comes up next.
I wasn’t lazy.
I approached it seriously.
That’s why I think I persisted for so long.
The premise I hardly doubted
I doubted the method many times.
I changed the stop-loss placement as well.
I changed the timeframes too.
I considered money management.
But there is one thing I almost never doubted.
That is,
“With enough experience, trading will improve.”
Even if I lose today, it becomes experience.
The time spent on validation would one day become technical skill.
Even if I can’t win now,
the experience is accumulating.
That’s how I thought.
So I believed that the time I spent on FX
was not mere consumption,
but an investment in the future
I thought.
But learning and being profitable are not the same
Of course, studying FX itself isn’t meaningless.
Reading a book increases your knowledge.
With validation, you can understand past price movements.
If you create rules, you can organize your actions.
This is true up to here.
But,
whether that translates into stable future profits is another matter.
That’s where I confused myself.
“Learning”
and
“the ability to make profits accumulating”
I almost treated as the same thing.
9万5,617 real-trade data
After I stopped FX, I learned about research on individual FX traders.
By Simon Hayley and Ian Marsh
“What do retail FX traders learn?”
This is the study.
It looked at95,617 individual traderswho used online FX trading platforms.
The period was about 30 months from January 2010 to June 2012.
It was not demo; it used real money trades.
One thing the researchers examined was
“Do individual FX traders improve with experience?”
This was exactly the question I had not doubted for five years.
There is no evidence that performance improves with experience
If experience made traders better,
their performance should improve as they continued trading.
However, the study found that
even after accounting for differences in ability among traders and the tendency for poorer performers to quit earlier,
there was no evidence that experience improved performance.
After adjustments, there was even a slight decline in performance as experience increased.
Of course, with just this study,
it cannot be said that “FX can never improve with study.”
It’s a study of a single trading platform over a specific period.
It also doesn’t deny that there are people who profit over the long term.
What was important to me was that
“don’t assume that simply accumulating experience naturally makes you better”
that conclusion.
If you can win for six months, can you say you’ve improved?
In FX, there are times when you do well temporarily.
You may win for six months.
You may win for a year.
That is indeed a result.
But,
is that method effective in the long term?
Did it just align with the market environment for that period by chance?
It’s not easy to distinguish.
In studies, it’s argued that the market environment during the target period might have favored certain strategies.
Therefore,
it’s better to separate short-term wins from having a reproducible ability.
I hadn’t made this distinction clearly enough.
Questions beyond “study more”
For five years, I pondered,
“How can I become better?”
But now I’d ask a prior question.
Is this really the kind of activity where experience can accumulate honestly?
How much time should I invest?
What remains when things don’t go right?
How long should I continue?
If you assume that “you can win by studying,”
then when you lose,
you’ll say,
“I still lack study.”
When you win,
it becomes the “result of study.”
And that makes it hard to know when to stop studying.
Directing serious effort and what you should continue are different
I don’t think this is limited to FX.
If you’re spending time on something.
If you’re studying hard.
Just because you’re doing it doesn’t mean you should continue.
Even if the effort is admirable,
you must consider whether there is value in continuing that effort from here on.
For five years,
I used the answer, “Study more.”
Now, I’d add one more question before that.
Do I truly want to keep investing time here?