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Have you ever felt stuck for inspiration and not really known what to do next to improve your trading? Well, this week I felt exactly the same way and I was kind of confused because I’ve never really had that much trouble before figuring out what to do next. So I’m standing here on the shore of Lake Jenny and thinking about why. Why am I stuck?

What I realized was, because we’re on holidays we’re driving round in an RV on the west coast of North America. Actually, we’re a little bit inland at the moment. We’ve been on the road for maybe four weeks or five weeks, coming up to five weeks, and what I realized was during that time I’d stopped reading new books. I’d referred back to a few old trusted books that I used many times before, but I’d stopped putting new stimulus in and so what I realized was that a lot of my trading ideas come as derivations of things that I read in the books.

So I guess the lesson for me today was that I need to constantly be reading and looking at new material, new inputs from different traders to give me ideas for my systems. If you’re going to develop your own systems or if you’re going to research systems, you need to be doing the same thing. One of the most important things you can do is keep reading trading books. I know a lot of people will say, “Well I watch YouTube videos and I read magazines and stuff,” and those are good, but I’ve talked about the importance of trading books in the past and I think it’s really important to get inside another trader’s mind, and you can’t really do that by watching the odd YouTube video.

To really get inside another trader’s mind, you need to follow their whole process, to read their whole book, and I did that last night. My wife, we’re in bed. I always go to bed early, but my wife wanted to read. I thought, “Okay, fine. I’ll pick up a book.” I picked up a trading book on my Kindle that I hadn’t read before, and I started reading, and I read the whole thing cover to cover and I had these epiphanies going off because I was getting inside this guy’s mind and he gave me all these great ideas for how to improve my trading, and develop new systems that were different, non-correlated to what I was already doing.

So even in that one session, I had three or four really solid system ideas that I’m now going to go and develop and put into production, so the lesson for me was don’t stop learning. Don’t stop reading. Keep exploring new authors, new trading ideas. Because that’s where you’re going to find the magic, the inspiration to keep going. There’s inspiration in the natural environment, like this Lake Jenny is just amazing. But then you also need intellectual inspiration, so go read some trading books and you will find that you’ll get better ideas and you’ll know what to do next in your trading. My name is Adrian Reid. This is Enlightened Stock Trading. See you in the next video. Bye.

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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.