The first commandment of profitable trading is you’ve got to learn the language. If you want to go into a foreign country and function effectively, you need to know the language or translate. In trading, most people come into the markets and think “I’m a smart person. I’ll figure it out.” But then they realize that the stock trading is confusing, and so they start to do some research and reading. When they get confused and don’t understand a term or a piece of information, a bit of their attention gets stuck on that. And the cycle goes on when they hit another confusing piece of information until they have no more capacity to learn.

You’ve got to understand the terms like drawdown, compound annual growth rate, pullback, and etc. I put together a document of trading terminology which you can download. If someone reads that once, they sort of know the language all of a sudden. That way, you can have more time to read a book, watch YouTube videos, read blogs about stock trading to expand your knowledge rather than struggle with the language.

If you want to learn effectively, you must know the language of the topic you’re learning. Just like everything else in investing, you have to learn the lingo.

author avatar
Adrian Reid Founder and CEO
Adrian is a full-time private trader based in Australia and also the Founder and Trading Coach at Enlightened Stock Trading, which focuses on educating and supporting traders on their journey to profitable systems trading. Following his successful adoption of systematic trading which generated him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year using just 30 minutes a day to manage his system trading workflow, Adrian made the easy decision to leave his professional work in the corporate world in 2012. Adrian trades long/short across US, Australian and international stock markets and the cryptocurrency markets. His trading systems are now fully automated and have consistently outperformed international share markets with dramatically reduced risk over the past 20+ years. Adrian focuses on building portfolios of profitable, stable and robust long term trading systems to beat market returns with high risk adjusted returns. Adrian teaches traders from all over the world how to get profitable, confident and consistent by trading systematically and backtesting their own trading systems. He helps profitable traders grow and smooth returns by implementing a portfolio of trading systems to make money from different markets and market conditions.