Day trading seminars, trading books, television commentators and radio advertisements are filled with promises of easy money in the stock market. With just a little bit effort and a fistful of dollars, you too can be enjoying the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

We know in our hearts that this is not true and yet everyday people put their hard-earned money down on the hopes of finding their path to financial freedom in the stock market. This is the same feeling that sheep have on the way to being sheared.

You should remember that anytime you begin a new venture your easy money and that you can expect to pay a price in time effort and money to learn how to survive in the trading game.

Your education begins with an honest assessment of the kinds of risks you are likely to face. You should be writing a business plan as a traitor in order to account for these risks and the way you intend to manage them so that you have a fighting chance of breaking even in your first year as a traitor and then surviving long enough to learn how to make profits.

At a minimum you should at least consider how to address the following kinds of risks:

1. Psychological risks: these are the challenges that your ego and peer pressure and family situations can bring to trading. If you're trading family money, or trading in public, or trading for any reason other than to make money to feed your family then you run the risk of getting in your own way with your poor psychology. The stock market acts in a way to cause the most pain to the most number of people based on herd psychology. If you do not work on your psychology than you will be a herd animal offering your money to the carnivores. Conduct self assessments into your strengths and weaknesses, take trader psychology profiles to determine what manner of strategy is best suited for your psychological makeup and conduct routine daily journaling to itemize your performance and learn from your mistakes.

A lot of beginning traders are under the mistaken assumption that if they have a back tested system, good preparation, a relaxed state of mind that they have an almost certainty of being successful.

If only it were that easy. All the preparation and the world does not guarantee effective performance. We still have to get in the water and start swimming with sharks. Your judgment, self-discipline and stress management techniques will all be tested on a regular basis once you begin trading.

There won't always be enough time to double check all your rules, so sometimes you're going to have to use your best judgment when the unexpected occurs.

This is the main reason why actual performance of traders varies from the statistics of mechanically back testing systems.

By measuring the difference between your performance and that of a theoretically mechanical system you can determine what affect your judgment is having upon your performance. You could call this the trader quality number and use it as the basis for judging your skill improvement.

In our traders masterminds, we recently gathered together a number of successful professional traders and looked into the qualities that made us successful. We settled on eight words that started with the letter P to help us focus on the successful traits.

They are: persistence, preparation, participation, practice, performance, perception, position sizing and preservation.

This essay looks at the fourth P. successful trading: Practice.

There is an old saying that practice makes perfect, but there's another saying it's even more true: perfect practice makes perfect.

In sports, the idea of practice is to create the muscle memory that will allow your body to instinctively perform properly under periods of stress, when the game is on the line and there's not enough time to think. At times like these, your body will automatically do the things that he has been trained and overtrained to do.