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Nial Fuller

NIAL FULLER Nial Fuller
Professional Trader, Author & Coach

Why Boring is Beautiful in Forex Trading

boringisbeautifulIf you’re trading properly, it should be boring. You should be doing nothing most of the time and you need to learn to embrace, to even enjoy doing nothing in the market, because as I will explain in today’s lesson, a bored trader is often a successful trader.

Boring is ‘beautiful’ in trading because it usually means you’re making money over the long-term. As opposed to the traders who are on an up and down thrill-ride through the market that is defined by high highs and even lower lows, a successful trader knows more or less what to expect each day as he or she enters their trading room. They know what they will do if X, Y or Z happens, they have a plan, they control themselves rather than let themselves be controlled by the ups and downs of the market, so for them, trading is basically boring.

Money is attracted to a trader that can control himself or herself, not to a trader who is all over the map and has no consistency, logic or discipline in his or her trading. Controlling yourself, is usually ‘boring’ by most accounts, because it usually means not giving into temptation and to how you feel in the moment. However, as you probably know, controlling yourself is also the way you achieve long-term goals that can change your life and which are much more meaningful than any short-term temptation.

Let’s discuss why boring is ‘beautiful’ in trading so that you will learn why you need to make trading ‘boring’ if you want to start making money in the market…

Trading is not your daily / nightly entertainment.

All too often, traders look for entertainment from the market, and even if they aren’t purposefully ‘looking’ for entertainment, the way that they trade certainly provides it. Trading can certainly be enjoyable, especially if you’re making money each month, but experiencing ‘entertainment’ and getting a thrill out of trading are the wrong outcomes to be looking for.

Based on my experiences and observations, if you feel entertained or excited by trading, be warned, it’s a sign that you’re trading improperly and it will lead to your downfall in the long-term, both mentally and financially.

If you feel excited, thrilled, angry or frustrated, each week in the market, you are not trading properly and you’re experiencing too much emotion as a result. Your day-to-day trading mindset should be one of clarity, calm and be relatively boring if you’re trading properly. If you trade in this manner over a long enough period of time, say 6 months to a year, you will eventually see consistent results and profits, and at that point, it’s OK to experience satisfaction and to be content with your trading performance.

Thus, you should be aiming for a longer-term feeling of contentedness and satisfaction with your trading results, and this will only come if your day-to-day and weekly trading experience is not marked by extreme highs and lows, but with consistency and a feeling of being ‘bored’, which is the result of trading with proper patience and discipline. Trading in this way will lead to a meaningful type of happiness with your trading that you will not achieve otherwise.

A boring day-to-day trading routine is a good trading routine

Trading is not a casino, it’s not a game, and it’s not here to entertain us. We need to show up to the office and perform the transactions we need to and let the market do the work. We must have outlets outside of trading so that trading does not become our main source of mental stimulation and excitement.

The daily routine of a trader should be boring and we shouldn’t try to fight that or try to find a way out of that feeling. If you are feeling bored with your trading then that means you’re probably on the right track.

If we let trading become our main source of mental simulation it will only lead to addiction, over-trading and obsessive screen watching and ‘zombification’. Do anything and everything to find another outlet… or suffer the financial consequences.

Trades take time, much more time than you think

It’s typical of the retail trader to not understand how long trades actually take to pan out, and it’s typical that they will question themselves and what they are doing when nothing is happening, i.e., no open trades and no signals. It’s almost like they want or need something to happen, so they end up forcing something (over-trading). You can’t make something boring un-boring, and the frank reality is a solid winning trade is painfully boring to watch unfold over a series of days and weeks (all the more reason to not sit there watching your trades!), embrace this, and when you feel it, it means you’re probably doing something right. If your heart’s not pumping and you don’t feel the butterflies in your stomach (you feeling nothing)… that’s a very good place to be for a trader, because it probably means you’re trading properly!

You need to trade ‘as if’

tradeasifMost of you reading this are probably trading relatively small accounts and so you face a daily temptation to want to build that small account as fast as possible. This feeling can cause you to over-trade and risk too much per trade, which will result in you actually losing money as fast as possible, instead of making it. Trading in this way is also very exciting, so it’s no surprise it causes you to lose money.

I have written before about trading as if you’re a hedge fund manager. Think about it, if you had millions of dollars under your control, especially if some of that money belonged to powerful investors who expected you to deliver them a decent return at year’s end, you would not be taking stupid risks with that money, i.e. over-trading and over-leveraging. Essentially, you’d be taking relatively small, calculated risks relative to the amount of money you had to trade with, this would make trading boring each day. This is how you need to trade now, even if you only have a $2,000 account, you need to ‘pretend’ as if it’s a $2,000,000 account.

The principles of trading success are the same; if you can trade successfully over the course of a year on a 2k account, you could do it on a 2 million dollar account as well. The reality however, is that most people trading with a 2k account will blow it out after 3 or 4 months, because they are trading with too much excitement as a result of trying too hard to make too much money too fast.

Think of it like this, excitement in trading is the direct result of trading in a manner that is too risky relative to your trading account size. So, if you’re managing risk properly and not over-trading, you should feel bored each day as you trade the market. But you should know that the more days and weeks you succeed in feeling bored with your trading, the greater chance you have of achieving long-term success in the market, which will bring a deep satisfaction and happiness that you will never get if you’re instead trading in a very excited, roller-coaster of emotions manner.

To get on the track to making your trading ‘boring’, you need to learn a simple trading method that won’t confuse you or cloud up your charts. The simplicity, and some might even say ‘boring’ nature of price action trading, is perhaps the best representation of why ‘boring is beautiful’ in trading. To learn the true power and ‘boring-beauty’ of my simple price action trading strategies, checkout my price action course and members community for more information.

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Nial Fuller

About Nial Fuller

is a Professional Trader, Investor & Author who is considered ‘The Authority’ on Price Action Trading. His blog is read by over 200,000+ followers and he has taught 25,000+ students since 2008. In 2016, Nial won the Million Dollar Trader Competition. Checkout Nial's Professional Trading Course here.
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  1. Terry

    Thank you, Nial. This is, and will forever be, an awesome and always relative article. Because of this, I’ve been able to get away from the computer often, and I’ve rediscovered a past passion of mine. Fishing!! Nothing like catching fish and pips at the same time. My fishing and my ‘pipping’ have both improved.

    All the best.

    Reply
  2. Zinnur

    Excellent lesson

    Reply
  3. Kate M

    Thank you Nial. Your course is my 3rd forex course – I don’t believe I will need another one. You have given what is needed by traders like me: hype free simple smart methods which work and don’t cost the earth.

    Reply
  4. Ahmad

    many thanks for the article, useful indeed

    Reply
  5. Gary

    Nial sums it up niceley! get yourself a jigsaw pussle, I did and my trading (away from 1hr and onto 4hr and daily) improved!

    Reply
  6. Florence

    thanks Nial. Your article has just come at the nick of time. I started trading with excitement, made a 100% profit in a week and in the following week I almost wiped out my account…you are a God send. Keep up your good work.

    Reply
  7. DocRS

    this article couldn’t come at a better time when I felt lost in the sea of sameness; trading. blew my account within a short time, and in a way, felt numb about the losses. got back my composure and decided to plough deeper into fundamentals before going back to the market again.

    lastly, am glad to be part of Nial’s community. am sure I will turn out better.
    cheerios…i

    Reply
  8. Nsibande Mzabaazo

    overwhelming Mr Fuller I take a bow for this one

    Reply
  9. peter le

    Differences between 2 group of traders:
    1) Novice traders: buy or sell.
    2) Professional traders: trade or do nothing.

    Reply
  10. Amos

    I have gained so much from Nial’s newsletters since i discovered his website sometimes in February. His wisdom has not only reshaped my perspective and understanding about trading but has truly revolutionized my trading career. The little i know today in Forex trading is attributed to his benevolent sharing of timeless secrets as a worthy mentor. It was to his credit i stopped wiping out my accounts. It was to his credit i started recording steady improvement in my trading performance.

    Today’s article is another priceless gem. Previously i was always obsessed with my laptop, ‘machine gunning’ every signal and sure enough i was always draining my account with losses. The story has since changed. Recently i decided to look for something to be doing to ease out the boredom of doing nothing while waiting for the market to do its own thing and confirm my PA based anticipation. This article has brought clarity and reinforcement to that resolve.

    Many thanks coach.

    Reply
  11. rajesh vishwakarma

    A good lesson

    Reply
  12. harpreet singh

    Thanks Nial, very good lesson.

    Reply
  13. Daniel

    Spoken like a true pro.

    Reply
  14. jeep

    You got me nial, love it

    Reply
  15. Patricia

    wow, the timing of this article is perfect as I have been “feeling bored” lately while waiting with patience and discipline for the market to show me clear, high quality setups before the next big move happens. I knew I was doing the right thing by waiting on the sideline instead of manifesting or forcing trades, but doing nothing day after day made me feel “bored”… now I look at “feeling bored” from a different perspective and feel much better and convinced about “feeling bored” and will look for this feeling in my daily trading routines. I have learned a very important lesson that doing nothing sometimes is one of the best, most important but also most difficult things to do in trading. Thank you so much for the wisdom !!!!

    Reply
  16. Swede

    Very smart….not too many have the courage to say such things when they are trying to build an on line trading school….refreshing in a sea of excitement junkies…thank you Nial!

    Reply
  17. Gilbert

    Something new. Something gained. Insightful, as usual. I felt my self reaching that state of nirvana with my trading. Thank you for reinforcing that idea.

    Reply
  18. Babul Akhtar

    What a wonderful article. If you feel boring, you are on wright truck. I felt same something like that. When I started trading, I was quite success. And obviously felt boring. Then I started over trading to cover my boring feelings. And my performance got too bad.

    This article gave me something very important.

    Thank you very much for opening my eyes :)

    Reply
  19. yucef

    thank you very much for all your best works

    Reply
  20. shirish

    I have been following this site since a year now. Will join membership soon. Hope to learn more from Nial Sir.

    @shabbir can you please tell me how did u open trading account from India.Need u r guidance as i want to start the same.

    Thanks

    Reply
  21. Siyabonga

    Thanks Prof. for yet another great article.!!

    Keep it up.

    Reply
  22. robert card

    Ahh nial you are like my pastor who gives a good sermon that speaks to me as if he knows exactly what was going on in my life that week. Well I started a new account two months ago thru pax Forex… To diversify my trading portfolio… and I of course always use a demo account and started out with a demo at 10k. I had two good long term trades (two weeks for one and a month for another) then last week I got “bored” and tried to make the market exciting…. And well I went from $13000 that extra 3000 that I earned from two good “crocodile trades” and pretty much gav most of those gains back…. Back at 10218 as of this morning. Then I woke up and saw your article. WOW!!!! I guess a good moral is if I get bored and need to make excitement of a trade… Take it out on a demo

    Reply
  23. Manish

    There’s lots of content relating to trading out there.
    Having 8 yrs of experience in trading I can vouch and recommend nialler fuller

    Jus keep up the good work

    Manish

    Reply
  24. Jeff Irick

    Great post, Nial. Every time I get “caught up in the moment” I go from profit to loss. One of the things I’ve found is that you if you set a sensible stop loss for the risk you’re willing to take and then set a reasonable exit strategy – and stick to it – you’ll win more trades than you lose. As you say, trading is definitely not a game. If you treat it like it is you may as well go to a casino. You’ve got about the same chance of success.

    Reply
  25. ManofSteel

    Your website is a great resource for traders like us. I appreciate the effort that you put in all the content that you offer to all the users.

    I visit the website at least twice a day

    Reply
  26. Shabbir

    Hey Nial, I bought your forex course a few months back… The teachings are amazing and has helped me make 150% profit on my trading account. In India, its pretty hard to find a trading mentor and your course simply rocks.

    Reply
  27. shane

    When you start out trading it takes a while before you start reading right through articles like this, in the early days as Nial says it`s the roller coaster build my bank quick mentality , i now wait for a certain monthly signal to enter the daily and leave it. Well done Nial.

    Reply
  28. PERI

    SIR, In fact, I am eagerly waiting for your Lesson. Thanks a lot.

    Reply