This will be a bit more of a personal story from when we started, and some of the things that turned out to be very valuable to us.
When we became interested in trading in 2013, we went through the usual steps most traders who want to learn themselves go through. We tried to learn both methodology and terminology but were finding contradictory and confusing information. We were lucky that we were mining at the time so that we had coins to trade without it breaking the bank, as we were losing money quickly at the time. This was the height of the BTC price at the time, and the media turned from new technology to the negative side with Mt Gox and Silk road. Not an easy time to learn how to trade in a market where you at the time couldn’t short yet, for traders who at the time didn’t know how shorting worked anyway.
Our most significant advantage at the time was that we were trading with a group, meeting twice a week, and going over all our trades and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I shudder thinking back on how many mistakes we made and how much money we lost on our mistakes. Back then you could mine a little over a B TC a single top of the line home computer, and we had ours on constantly.
When you start trading, almost everybody will run into a period in which things are not going the way you want it. Either the market changed from the market in which your strategy works, or you were unlucky a few times in a row, or perhaps your mindset has changed, or you aren’t keeping with your plan anymore. Whatever the issue is, there is going to come a time when you will start reevaluating your decision to become a trader or to spend time trading. Some people can keep at it, but many will find it helpful to have a group of other traders to talk to, who might have the same issues they are having.
When you go to the Crypto forums, you will see many people who are claiming to keep raking in the money, or who are actively trolling other traders. People tend to get dragged into common market sentiment and become more bullish or more bearish than they would otherwise be. So pretty soon, when you turn to these channels, these will not help you get motivated again.
For me, it has been precious to have fellow traders around me always, both in real life and online. There are many free groups of traders, including ours, which you can use to keep yourself sharp and motivated and where you can share your pains and successes. Perhaps trading is a lonely business, but it helps to have people around you.