One of the hardest things I have ever done was becoming profitable trading the stock market and commodity market. There are many obstacles between you and success as the two biggest ones are technical analysis and trading psychology. Mastering your trading mindset takes a long time and can really only be done through coaching and experience. However you can shorten the learning curve by reading articles and books on trading psychology. Some books I recommend are written by Mark Douglas and Dr. Van Tharp. They have both taught some of the best traders in the world and have many years of experience.

Technical analysis on the other hand can be learned in many different ways such as books, articles, coaching, seminars and finally videos. I have come to the conclusion that learning about technical indicators and chart patterns is best done through videos.

Trading is about looking at charts, then analyzing them extensively and then finally using technical indicators or chart patterns to enter the trade. So why not learn all these things through videos where you are presented not only with the theory but also with many great trade examples. Watching videos will save you a lot of screen time because you do not need to find trade examples yourself. In a way you are gaining experiencing while learning as you are combining theory and practice. If reading an article about, for example Bollinger Bands, you are only shown the functionality in writing when you are then shown a chart with Bollinger Bands you are almost starting all over again. Yes you have the basic knowledge but now you have to combine it with the visual part of chart reading. So reading an article first and then looking at charts is a slow way of learning about technical indicators and chart patterns.

By learning about trading through videos you are training the eye to spot the setups that your indicator or chart pattern is providing you with. When you trade real time you often have to make a decision about a trade in matters of seconds so it is important that you have trained your eyes to spot the signals quickly.

Thanks to YouTube and the internet we can now easily get our hands on video tutorials teaching us everything from analysis, to tailing and to writing a trading plan. You no longer have to learn trading by joining seminars across the country but better yet you can re-watch these videos again and again. The internet is truly great however the amount of badly produced videos is on the rise. We are now seeing more and more videos not so much teaching people as "selling" systems. Systems that are more often than not full of flaws. These systems can cost a lot of money in the form of trading losses especially if the trader has no prior knowledge about money management. Most of these videos just show a winning trade instead of teaching. A lot of traders then think trading is easy and they start putting on trades without any real knowledge about how to trade the stock market.

You might think that because I write about how videos have made learning to trade easier that trading itself is easy. This could not be further from the truth. Trading is not something you learn overnight so I urge you to educate yourself prior to trading. Videos are just a tool and not the answer to success.