When someone says Market Correlation, the first thing that comes to your mind is an idea of how one instrument reacts because another instrument moves up or down. Today I don’t want to talk about why you should be buying Crude if USDCAD drops or why Gold and AUDUSD move in the same direction. On the other hand, I want to discuss a correlation that 99% of traders don’t see, and it’s a crucial one in Trading & Life. It’s not as easy as market correlation, so to give you a complete picture, I want to tell you a story about me that majority of you don’t know.

Correlation Between Your Childhood & First Year of Your Trading Results Is 80%

For every person in the world, growing up is the best period of their life. How much I was born during the worst period for my country, I can say that my childhood was magical, and I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. I can’t say that my family had a lot of money, but we were a “middle class.” The person that was my role model during that period was my grandfather. He was my superhero because he managed to become the CEO of the biggest company in old Yugoslavia, PTT, even though he was born in the lowest-earning city in Serbia. His parents didn’t have much money. It was wartime, so too many things could shape you to become an average salary guy, but not he became the second person in the company with over 30,000 employees during that time. So right from the start, I saw that anybody could become successful in life if they worked hard enough.

Of course, when you are young, all that stuff is not something you take for granted easily, and during my high school period, I was “crazy” like most teenagers, maybe even crazier. The only things I cared about during my growing up were skateboarding, parties, math, coding, and girls. I spent more time in cafes and pubs than going to school. Don’t get me wrong, I passed my high school with good grades, but it’s more because I had a quality teacher in primary school, so I had the advantage, and I overused that part as much as I could. I would always rather skip school to go and do something else like drive to a skatepark or hang with friends, compared to working on myself.

After many crazy things, including running away from home when I was 18 years old, I knew that I would disappoint my family and, most importantly, my grandfather if I didn’t sort my life a little bit. Around that time, I decided I didn’t want to go to college, but I needed some work to help my family with bills and for myself. Maybe it’s luck, but I don’t believe in that; I was introduced to Forex Trading after watching a few trading movies and tv shows.

The first reaction of my parents was not that great. Still, I understood that I wanted to give up eight years of coding experience to try to become a Wall Street guy, and with my actions, during my entire high school, I didn’t show them any interest other than coding or skateboarding. I was always sure I could become anyone I wanted since, as I told you earlier, my grandpa made it, so why can’t I do the same thing.

When I started to trade; how much I loved math, I hated reading, so I was trying to use my math skills only during the first year. I didn’t want to read much about trading, just basics, I was sure I could make it, and of course, my results were sideways. Fortunately, right from the start, I had a good coach that showed me what I needed to know about trading. They told me all the small things I needed to master, if I wanted to work with them. I think it took me 3-4 months to get all the education on all subjects and a lot more to practice everything I learned until I became successful. But in general, that first year was similar to childhood, you are trying something new, you have the motivation, and when you understand how the market works, you have a chance to make profits.

Correlation Between Learning a New Skill & Your Trading Results In First 3 Years is over 90%

Now let’s talk about the next stage, the stage of growth! Once I learned the basics, I didn’t forget that I always needed to improve more. For me, Elliott Wave Theory was a dream coming true, it’s a pure statistic, and if you spend time drawing labels all day long, you can always be profitable. After 2nd year of learning and trading using Elliott Wave exclusively, I started to offer money management to friends, and in just one year, I had over 150 clients. The capital was getting bigger and bigger every month, and my trading was on point. During those stages of my life, I sacrificed a lot of friendships, girls, and parties, and I was focusing on becoming a better version of myself.

For over a year, during the start of my first official fund, the only people I saw and talked to were my clients. Didn’t have a girlfriend or any social life outside of that trading world. It’s not that I didn’t want it. I traded 14h and all the free time I used for meetings with clients. I’ll never say that I regret working hard. That would be a lie. I knew from the start that if you want to become the best, you need to sacrifice something, but I would probably go slower and spend more time with true friends than distancing myself from everyone.

You can say that Elliott Wave was the new skill I mastered, and my results were getting better and better. Working the same thing over and over will make a routine, and it’s becoming easier to trade daily.

This proves the correlation between starting stages of your carrier and trading. When you master a new skill, you can always be good at that.

Correlation Between Your Motivation Drop & Your Trading Results Is over 95%

Years were passing. I was doing the same thing over and over again. I was over working myself. It was expected that I fall asleep two or three times per week on a trading desk. At one point, my motivation dropped. I didn’t feel happy doing counts and trading for the top funds in the world even.

Most changes in my life were drastic, similar to how I decided to start trading. After getting the recognition that I’m among the top traders in Europe, I just gave up and wanted to retire. I managed to make for myself what I think is enough and wanted to change my life. I sold one of the funds I had, gave a second to a friend that was working with me, and I went to Milano, Italy.

The first seven days were great, I didn’t even take the phone with me when I was leaving the hotel, I needed a break from everything, wanted to get back to social life more, and everything looked fine. Every day was same, new sports car, a new girl, and a lot of BS like that. After two and half weeks of life like that, I got depressed again, even thinking that my life didn’t have a point and hundred stupid things in my mind.

How many people would say you needed a break, you deserved it? This wasn’t the break I was looking for. During my teenage years, I’ve been to many parties, and even then, I understood that you’d get bored if you did it every day. One night in Milano, I was lying down in a bed with a person that I can’t remember the name even and couldn’t fall asleep, thinking about what I had done wrong. I followed my grandfather’s advice. I worked hard, but I’m not happy. That pushed me to think hard, and I knew that I couldn’t be satisfied if I didn’t work what I love, and that’s trading. From any skill I learned in life, only trading truly made me happy, so I decided to get back to trading, but I didn’t want to trade for others. I again put all of my saved money (what I call pension now) into the broker house and started.

It wasn’t 100% the same, but it was good, and I was “maybe” happy. I promised myself that I wouldn’t work more than four hours per day and only trade when I felt like trading.

Comparing the results for the first two years after I started to trade again and when I was trading at my best, you can see a big difference. I was in profit every month, but the returns were much smaller. This part is delicate since the account is enormous, and I could live more than decent with those returns. But at the end of the day, I wasn’t proud of myself, so motivation was dropped one more time.

Correlation Between Being Truly Happy With Your Life & Your Trading Results is 100%

Most people would say that Covid was the worst thing that happened. I’ll never say that’s not true. For me, that was the time when I finally started to be happy. During the early times of covid, I was invited to speak at a seminar In Croatia for a local broker house, so I got a ticket to Serbia to visit my twin sister before I went to give a speech that I had prepared for over two months. When I landed in Serbia, our government had frozen all borders, so I was forced to cancel everything and stay with my sister until the lockdown was over. My jobs were down for the first few months, I was trading every day for a few hours and made significant profits, but I was bored like hell. I was thinking during that time that the one thing I didn’t want to admit was to myself is the fact that during the years when I was working a lot and didn’t go out much, I gained a little bit of weight, and that was one of the things that I wasn’t happy about. To be exact, I gained around 30-35 kg (66-70 LBS). Now I had a lot of free time, so I could work on that part. I joined the gym the first day my government allowed them to work, and like the majority of the things I do in life, I will give my best, or I won’t do it at all. After a few months, I have seen good progress. I’ll include an image of me done by the same photographer 90 days apart. This really helped me to clear my mind and be more relaxed in general.

That new thing I added in addition to trading really made me much happier, and if you look at my results, I think that the first year of Covid was better than my best year when I was among the top traders in Europe. I liked that part a lot. My days were full of different activities, spending time with friends, not clients so much, trading two hours in the morning, coaching new retail traders, girlfriend walks with my dog, parties… Better to say everything I love doing, but in the amounts that makes me happy.

So when you compare this stage of my life, from covid till now, I’m a much happier person, my trading is excellent, I continued to learn more and consistently trying to become better after each trade. So the same thing as during the fund stage, but I’m happy, so you can easily say that we have a 100% correlation between being truly happy with your life and your trading results.

Conclusion

Searching for becoming a better version of yourself is the process that takes your entire life, so as long as you are ready to work on yourself constantly, you are going to see improvements and growth in yourself and with that in your trading. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Everyone makes them. I made a hundred and one mistake. Our job is to try to learn and improve ourselves, nothing is unreachable, and you can become who you want.

Think about this correlation and tell me whether you see how your life impacts your trading.

Anyone can become a profitable trader. You just need to work towards your dreams and goals! – Nicola Delic

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