Do You Need to be a Genius to Manage your Time and be on Top of your Game?

Dear Financial Voice Reader,
Do You Need to be a Genius to Manage your Time and be on Top of your Game?
When I was young I also wondered how one can be so wise and smart to be able to know every single thing about the market and make sense of all these numbers and levels and analysis on top of analysis. However as I grew older I understood that the notion of the “all-knowing analyst” that can understand every single market statistic and applies it towards profit doesn’t exist.
All these people that have successful careers in money management are not some kind of 4-digit IQ geniuses that we see in films like “Limitless” nor do they employ an army of extremely bright analysts to understand where the market is going. Sure Goldman’s Sachs and the rest of the high street firms have a very large number of employees but they also deal in thousands of products across hundreds of markets.
So what does it come down to when we’re discussing how to understand where the market is going and what the next step towards the right direction is? I believe that the answer is two-fold: you need to have a simple or even simplistic understanding of the general financial developments across the globe and then have a plan of action, a way to recognize opportunities across different instruments and capitalize on them.
Some may call it short-cuts. But short-cuts work. They provide efficiencies, they give all of us productivity, and that means time. They give us competitive advantage, even self-proclaimed brands of genius!
Now the first one is rather simple: anyone with a fairly reasonable grasp on financial language and terms can understand how any new development is expected to influence the global and domestic economies. And if you can’t then it is very simple to learn, you don’t need to go to college, just pick up a book on what financial terminology stands for or log on to Investopedia.comthat offers a complete dictionary.
The second one is also pretty simple as well or rather it has to be if you want to be successful in applying it day after day. Your plan of action needs to consist of:
• an identifying trigger that will draw your attention to an opportunity: it can be a fundamental development or a technical pattern on a chart,
• a simple execution sequence: where to get on a trade, where and when to exit it and how to accomplish it – manual vs. automated execution, entry orders vs. live market orders and
• a set of money management rules: how much risk to assume per trade, your desired risk/reward ratio.
And then all you have to do is close your ears to the excess information that exists in abundance on all the media, the television and the internet, the magazines and the market chatter and just execute. I believe that for someone to be profitable in this business all it takes is a sound plan of action with simple rules and the conviction to apply it every single day because trading success is built on small little gains day in and day out. Sure we all hope to find the perfect opportunity that would skyrocket us to fame and fortune but that rarely happens.
You see we are all able to make the usual NBA “Million Dollar Shot” by scoring from the middle of the court and surely enough if you take a million or more shots one of them is bound to end in the basket. However the guys that make the really big bucks on the magical world of US basketball are the ones that net the far simpler 2-points and 3-points shots but do it again and again and again. Well trading is like that, you see a shot that you’re comfortable with and you take it. And then you do it again.
Spend time working out your short cuts (not cutting corners). Work out your tools and resources. For me it was speed reading as a child. It was knowing what sites to go to to find information. It was memory training and learning the art of memory and recall and why we remember some things and not others.  The most important thing – be fascinated – interest yourself and you will remember. That’s when you become Einstein in your field.