Is trading An Art Form?

I have been trading and investing for many years. In the early days of my trading one of my biggest challenges was trading a system with exact entry and exit points. No matter how hard I tried I did not trust the system to perform on a regular basis.

The same old story repeated time and again: I would do well for a while and then, boom, the system stopped working for me.

Like many traders in the beginning and intermediate stages I would blame my inability as a trader for the demise. This went on for several years. Yes, my friends, you read correctly: Several years.

After two years I met a professional trade rwho mentored me. He is the number one reason why I did not give up, as he showed me a very different aspect of "being" as a trader. He introduced me to the idea of going with the flow and allowing the market to come to me.In my�the early trading days I would obediently follow system after system with exact entries and exits. I painstakingly honed in on refining entry methods and would go� into melt down each time I deemed my entries not to be prefect, repetitive, almost machine like.

Needless to say the end result was always the same: I would win some and then give it all back. I just could not stick with any system for very long.

Finally it dawned on me that my trading personality was not really suited to the exacting science of strict entry levels of semi mechanical systems. Sniper trading, where the aim is to take your set ups come what may just did not cut it for my trading personality.The reason for this was very obvious: Like so many other traders before me I had fooled myself into believing that I could turn myself into a robot like trading machine churning out profit after profit, like a conveyor belt.

I have always been a very visual person who sees the bigger picture of a room design, a garden design and of course on the charts. I can feel energies emanating from other people, my environment and I can feel the energies of price action when I watch a 3 min chart, or even a 30m chart. Of course feeling one's way into trades is not condoned as a valid trading method by most traders.

Alas, what if feeling your trades is far more important than we have given it credit for?

Trading is first and foremost a reflection of all human potential compressed into charts. Every chart you look at represents an aspect of you, as the trader, and as you, the human being with all your different character traits. There is infinite creative potential in every chart, just as there is in every human being.

Simply because you are looking at charts does not negate basic human nature with all its possibilities away. No matter how clever a trading robot will be, they all fail sooner or later, because they cannot account for the immense complexity and limitless creativity of human nature. The more compressed your trading system, the more you are cutting yourself off from creating trading profits, instead of inviting them by embracing the markets creative potential which you, the trader cannot ever fully foresee.

This is not to say that you cannot trade fully automated system as a part of your different trading strategies. However, when we try to force ourselves into one single aspect of our trading personality, we are bound to fail sooner or later in our trading efforts.

It is rather like assuming that you can go through life always smiling, or always looking miserable. Either way, you will find the extreme rather limiting to your limitless means of expression.

So here we are, attempting to place our trading methods, or trading strategies into a straight jacket� resulting in emotional congestion which can be down right paralysing. Trading like this is rather like denying your truly infinite potential as well as denying the market its nature�of expressing itself as a mirror of human life.

Whether you are willing and ready to realise it or not, you are the unique creator of your trading life, the markets are a magic mirror of the collective human creation expressing their thoughts, feelings and emotions. Pretty ingenuous, wouldn't you say? And you want to reduce the market to a two dimensional robotic system into which you can neatly fit yourself? Time to take a reality check, me thinks, and start looking at your trading strategies again, for trading is an art form�and your trading should reflect this.