First strep in being a profitable trader

At the beginning of year lot of people decide to take their trading seriously. If you are one of those person , the first thing you need to do is to develop a logical and well thought out setup and a process flow to trade it. 

The setup selection process is most important part of the puzzle and requires research and very good understanding of various trading styles and intricacies of them. Fortunately there is lot of information available about this in public domain.

Most traders in the beginning start by imitating someone else. They learn the  style and setup.from some person or some book or service and that helps them to shorten their learning curve. As the person gains more confidence or finds the style not working for them , they experiment and develop own setups. This is an iterative process. 

Finding setups is only 30% of the challenge for new traders. Good setup by itself does not guarantee trading success. For that you need to develop a well thought out process to trade that setup and stick to that process for long period of time. 

Developing a good trading process flow will pay dividend for years as once a process becomes part of you , you need very little time to manage it and it becomes automatic process. Developing good process for just one setup requires six to 12 months. 

The challenge for new trader is to survive this entire process and not lose money. Which is where many who attempt fail. They underestimate the time and effort required to find good setup and process flow.