The struggle of learning to trade has been compared to puzzle solving, in this case a jigsaw puzzle.
While a puzzle analogy looks good, trading is no ordinary puzzle and provides no short cuts that your standard puzzle does.
Standard puzzles come with the following assists that can aid in solving them:
- You know how many pieces are in the puzzle.
- You can see the clear shape, color, and configuration of each piece, helping you to figure out which pieces go together. You can easily isolate the border pieces based on the piece shape.
- You can usually see a picture of the completed puzzle, giving you help using color groupings to match associated puzzle pieces.
The “trading” puzzle has no such advantages:
- You have no idea of how many pieces of the puzzle you need to create a working trading system. The market is a complex system of the resulting input of millions of traders/investors/computers. That creates an infinite number of solution paths along with their corresponding puzzle pieces that are waiting to be discovered.
- You don’t have any kind of descriptor information on any piece. You have to work to find working pieces of the puzzle through pain staking observation. There are a myriad of potential behaviors/conditions to analyze to try to determine some type of connection/relationship for each “puzzle piece” to be discovered.
- There is no advance “completed picture” to look at that will help you put the puzzle pieces together.
Faced with these additional hurdles, it’s clear the level of difficulty in solving the trading puzzle will be extremely high compared to even complex jigsaw puzzles.
While solving a hard jigsaw puzzle can take weeks or months, solving the puzzle of learning to trade can takes years or even decades, if ever.
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