The way to take maximum advantage of a situation where you are being offered unlimited opportunities to do something for yourself is to get into the flow. The market does have a flow. It is often erratic, especially in the shorter time frames, but it does display symmetrical patterns that repeat themselves over and over again. Obviously, it's a contradiction to flow with something you are against.
If you want to start sensing the flow of the market, your mind has to be relatively free of fear, anger, regret, betrayal, despair, and disappointment.
You won't have a reason to experience these negative emotions when you assume absolute responsibility. Earlier, I said that when you don't take responsibility, one of the major psychological obstacles that can block your success is that you will mislead yourself into believing that your trading problems and lack of consistency can be rectified through market analysis. To illustrate this point, let's go back to our novice trader who started out with a carefree state of mind until he experienced his first loss. After winning with such ease and effortlessness, the abrupt shift to emotional pain can be quite shocking—not shocking enough, however, to quit trading. Besides, in his mind the situation wasn't his fault anyway; the market did it to him. Instead of quitting, the great feeling that he experienced when he was winning will be fresh in his mind, and will inspire him with a sense of determination to continue trading.
Only now he's going to be smarter about it. He's going to put some effort into it and learn everything he can about the markets. It's perfectly logical to think that if he can win not knowing anything, he'll be able to clean up when he does know something. But there's a big problem here that very few, if any, traders will have any awareness of until long after the damage is done. Learning about the markets is fine and doesn't cause a problem in itself. It's the underlying reason for learning about the market that will ultimately prove to be his undoing.
As I said a moment ago, the sudden shift from joy to pain usually creates quite a psychological shock. Very few people ever learn how to reconcile these kinds of experiences in a healthy way.
Techniques are available, but they aren't widely known. The typical response in most people, especially in the type of person attracted to trading, is revenge. For traders, the only way to extract that revenge is to conquer the market, and the only way to conquer the market is through market knowledge, or so they think. In other words, the underlying reason for why the novice trader is learning about the market is to overcome the market, to prove something to it and himself, and most important, to prevent the market from hurting him again. He is not learning the market simply as a means to give himself a systematic way of winning, but rather as a way to either avoid pain or prove something that has absolutely nothing to do with looking at the market from an objective perspective. He doesn't realize it, but as soon as he made the assumption that knowing something about the market can prevent him from experiencing pain or can help satisfy his desire for revenge or to prove something, he sealed his fate to become a loser.
In effect what he has done is set up an irreconcilable dilemma.