Introduction

Trading is a large rollercoaster full of highs, lows, and unexpected turns. Trading will put you through the best and the worst periods of your life and can cause a lot of stress on you. Is it worth pursuing? It depends on you, your interests, your goals, and the effort you are willing to put into it. In this article, I’ll share my own experience with trading to help you decide if it’s a path you want to explore.

Interests: The Foundation of Trading

The first thing you have to ask yourself is: Are you genuinely interested in trading? I can’t stress this enough: having an interest in the market, what drives it, and diving into data is the foundation of trading. If you find that boring, then trading isn’t going to work for you. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme; it takes a grind with a lot of effort and patience and love for the game. If you find it boring, then it won’t end well in the long term.

For me, it all started with crypto back in 2019. I just turned 18 and wanted to pursue something I could make money with—technology that I found interesting. So I came across crypto and started learning about the different coins, what they stand for, and what they desired to achieve, and it snowballed from there, and I eventually started learning world economics and everything that drives markets to do what they do. Understanding all this was more important to me than actually making money, and that made me push through. What keeps me hooked is running different experiments to see what performs better than others and implement these things into my strategy. I even made a strategy once tied to the moon. It flopped, but just testing it out was fun for me.

If you can’t find that fun in trading, then it’s doomed to become a dreadful and boring journey. When the first loss streak creeps up, you will quit with the idea that trading is a scam and not worth it even.

The Long Game

Trading is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. My journey started as a hobby, but it grew into something bigger. During school, I traded full-time instead of slogging through a boring summer job I hated. The profits I made funded my student costs; I could eat out, go to the gym, and party, all on my own terms, and this was worth all the effort it took to get me there. Even though I’m part-time again since I want some more IT experience in production environments to later on make trading tools/bots and deploy them and go full-time again. It’s been a progression of commitment, not a lucky break.

But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. I had multiple times in the 5 years I have been trading that I had to take a break because of being burnt out mentally. Constantly following the markets and trading 24/7 took a toll, and taking a break was the only way to clear my head and rest, but my passion for the process kept me in the game. Without that, I’d have walked away.

Facing the Realities

Trading has a lot of challenges: losing streaks, stress, sleepless nights, and so on. You have to find ways to work around these challenges to keep going in the long term. My view of trading has changed a lot since starting when I was just a teenager; I thought it would make me a millionaire overnight. Now, I see it as a way to become rich over the long term if done right. It has been the hardest thing I ever did so far.

Balancing with life can be tricky, but it is doable. The most common pitfall I had was living and breathing trading 24/7; it was all I could think or talk about, which was annoying for my friends since they weren’t interested in that, so I would isolate more or just feel like the odd one out.

I fixed all this by dedicating specific hours to trading, and going out more, going to the gym, and taking on other hobbies. It’s about discipline, not obsession.

Tips for the Road Ahead

My advice for beginners? Never pay for trading groups or signals. It’s a trap; rely on yourself instead. Books, free courses, and practice accounts beat any paid “guru” nonsense. I fell for the paid traps back in the day, and they caused more harm than good. This is why this website exists: because I want to provide value to people for free.

Conclusion

So, is trading worth it? For me, it was, because I had the interest and passion for it. Without that, I wouldn’t be writing this article here today and would’ve quit a long time ago. Now it’s up to you to decide if you have the passion that it takes to trade or if you’re better off finding something else to do.