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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.

In recent traders roundtable discussion, a group of experience traders were considering the factors that lead to trading success, and came up with the eight "P's": persistence, preparation, participation, practice, performance, perception, position-sizing, preservation. They concluded that your trading results would be a function of which one of these eight you were weakest in. This essay will discuss the ideas about participation.

The market is full of uncertainty and many times it seems like the more you analyze in the more you think about it the harder it is to actually pull the trigger. It is an inescapable fact that you cannot make money on the sidelines.

There are moments when the market is in sideways conditions and there's no apparent directional bias that makes sense. Clearly, there are other times when the market is trending either up or down and it becomes clear which side of the market you want to be on. Our nerves and apprehensions can lead us to way too long to get into the market and we miss significant portions of the trend. That's the case were lack of participation harms your trading results. It's a clear case also of trading certainty for performance.