One of the worst things a developing trader can do is follow gurus.
Gurus are not mentors.
Gurus offer answers; mentors teach you how to arrive at answers.
Gurus promote the right way to do things; mentors teach you to find the right ways for you.
The recent Forbes article highlights the sobering fact that 95% of people are imitators; only 5% are initiators and innovators. Isn't it interesting that those odds are similar to the odds of independent traders becoming consistently profitable? Imitation is not a winning strategy. It is a sure path for being part of a herd.
When I spoke with traders at the recent meetup for My Investing Club, I emphasized the importance of learning from your own trading experience: what works for us and makes sense to us often reveals our underlying strengths. A mentor can help you learn from your experience; not follow their advice and experience.
The MIC home page begins with the phrase, "Mentorship is the shortcut to success." That calls to mind a story recalled in a Jewish book called Tanya. A Rabbi was trying to find his way to the city and asked a child for directions. The child explained that there was a "short and long way" and a "long and short way". The Rabbi took the short and long way and found his path obstructed. He then returned and asked the child why he had said the path was short. The child said, "Didn't I also tell you it was long?"
The path of the guru is the short but long way. It promises quick answers, but these don't work in practice, because they do not draw upon *your* strengths and *your* ability to adapt to shifting markets. When you follow the guru, you become obstructed--and that makes it a long way.
The long but short way is mentoring. It takes time to learn from experience and internalize those lessons, just as it takes time to become a golf champion or an Olympic winner. Mentoring can accelerate the development process by helping you learn from both successes and mistakes--and by giving you *many* models of success that you can integrate to make your own. That makes mentoring the long but short way--the real shortcut, as MIC notes.
The Forbes article points out how easy it is for us to become influenced by others. I have never met a consistently profitable trader who has not demonstrated a high degree of intellectual independence. At SMB, for example, developing traders are part of a team and receive mentoring from senior, successful traders. They are expected, however, to develop their own "playbooks" and cultivate their own understandings of markets, stocks, and opportunities.
One of the most common errors we make in thinking about trading success is that mentoring is limited to the early years of development. If markets always traded the same way and followed the same patterns, this would be the case. It is the ever-changing nature of markets that ensures we not only learn, but continually relearn and update our learning. That means it is helpful to have mentors throughout one's trading career: colleagues we can learn from. In dynamic fields, such as medicine and technology, education is not enough. Success requires continuing education. And that means ongoing mentoring.
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