As part of my attempts to produce on income for myself and the family I have spent much of the last twelve months engaged in the pursuit of riches online with Forex trading.

With the recent comotion around #Grexit I am once again faced with re-building an account that has once again snapped back in my face. It is a painful thing to lose money you needed, money you had mentally prepared to remove from an online account into circulation for your own ends. The flavour of this pain is different every time. 

The first (and still the largest) was outright debilitating shock, I literally ceased to function at any reasonable level for a while, indeed I stayed away from trading for about four weeks while I processed moving from a position of elation and even a touch of pride in myself (the mechanics of which I will cross another time) to the utter dismay of seeing an entire years income vanish in a matter of days while what I had foreseen and intended to trade took place, only with me disfunctionally on the opposite side of the trade. Had I but waited patiently and gotten some sleep I would of taken a years income and turned it into actual debt-free existence.

This loss has had a profound effect on my trading. In many ways it has matured my approach not just with this but across the board. For the first time in my life I have begun to value self-discipline; what was once shunned as too restrictive, the antagonist to free-spirited ideals, an emissary of ‘the Man’ suddenly registered as the defining characteristic of sucessfully finding my inner capabilites and getting to spend some quality time with them. In fact there is a hint of sadness now as I look back and see all the times in my life so far that the lack of discipline has self-sabotaged things that appeared to be vibrant, meaningful contributions to my life and yet finished up rather dull examples of ordinary.

Through improving self-discipline (note to self: finish ‘4 Hour Chef’ by @tferriss 4hourchef and explore meta-learning principles for self-discipline) I have built from nothing into what would be considered an excellent percentage return. This process was casual, enjoyable and to some extent effortless. Now four times since I have built my account only to hit a similar figure value and come unstuck, make poor choices, lose discipline and lose in a large, rapid, chunk that which had taken several weeks to construct. Self-discipline need only falter for a moment it seems for a world to come crashing down.

It seems this should of been emphasised during  school education (although my own functioning grey matter would probably of found some way to by-pass its absorption no doubt, arse of a thing). Self-discipline is merely a tool to be employed to achieve something. It really is quite simple and yet it has taken 35 years to impress upon me, I would like to find this hightly unfair but I really dont have the time to spend feeling sorry for myself.

Self-discipline is by far the number one tool you must have when engaging with the game of finance, all else becomes moot should you fail at this task. It could well be the most vital tool for anyone, everyone and all those others too.

Number two on the list when exploring money making with markets is simplicty. Specifically being media shy, news ignorant and technical indicator light. Excessive amounts of noise from all these sources dilute the rythmn with which the charts do and do not flow. Their tempo and gracefulness foretell direction, determination and expectation. Often times news will appear to confuse itself between the chicken and the egg with banal stories thrown around as sound reasoning as a chart grows tiresome of its trending movement and issues a desire for change. Through simplicity you will create an income for yourself because the times when it is clear as day what is happening are frequent enough that even a small hand will achieve great things.

The magic number three leads us to, well the magic. Ones own power of thought creation and capacity to believe the reality of those thoughts before they are as yet physically measurable. A whole series, or at least one very in-depth tome of a post will undoubtably follow in the coming weeks regarding my own mechanical disassembly of the manifestation process, suffice to say it pains me to see so many people out there monetising something that should be open source, especially as these same individuals claim Love and Humanity as bedrocks of their beliefs. Surely a world further ahead and more creatively competent is preferable to personal profiteering. Ask yourself; then write down concisely, the level of income per year that is the bare minimum you would accept surving on. Make sure this figure is grouded enough that you can actually picture yourself doing something mundane while having this much (anyone can imagine sitting in a flash car and cruising on a private jet with millions, the skill is in walking the dog and making a sandwich as a truly wealthy individual through and through). Then take this number and chunk it to monthly, weekly and daily amounts; you now have a baseline.

If you ever have a position that in a day unexpectedly delivers a week or months requirement, take it. Take it and take a week off. This is the fourth factor of Forex. Know when to separate from your account. Know that when you are given a grace you must grab it and walk away. It is a signpost, a red flag of trouble around the corner, the crest of the wave is going to clean you up from behind. This is the moment that will show you how greedy you are. Greed is good. Greed is bad. There are no absolutes except in hindsight and you should absolutely of taken that trade and taken a week off to freshen up.

Five. Finally. Patience. You have a target, you have your baseline. Now is the time to accept that getting eighty percent of the way there will undoubtedly appear to be both slow and painful. Once there though, a feat that can be achieved through the resilient diligence of patient practice; remembering that much like in physical training where each repitition of each exercise should be approached as practice for the next repitition, each time you observe an opportunity the time should be taken to know what it is you intend to do with this trade, the in, the out, the fall back, the why, the what might be happening if this does go wrong and how that can be traded. Learn to repeat yourself and with each repitition become better.

Your destination is only a few simple repititions away.