Does trading allow all the freedom you want?

One of the biggest allure's people have in gravitating towards a career as a trader rests on the notion that the freedom it affords those who make a success of it is probably the highest in the world. The error of falling into this line of thinking only makes its presence known when an aspirant trader, whose whole life has been shaped around rules and laws of society, finds misfortune at the opposite end of it's outcome leaving a vastly different perspective to a previously idealistic thought.

Although the freedom we attain through taking control of our financial well-being and shifting our profession from being boxed in under a job title into a much more independent role as sole decision maker with the liberty to stimulate our growth as we see necessary, the completeness of freedom should never be overstated.

I often recall the literature of the late Mark Douglas contained in his book Trading in the Zone where he spoke at length about the difficulty most traders find themselves in when dealing with contradictions stemming from their reluctance to depart from their habitual ways learnt from the ordinary process of being exposed to the world along with its beliefs.

However in markets nothing is ever fixed and no exact moment is replicated, it's in constant evolution from the status quo and as much as we'd like to think there's a hierarchy of intellectual authority on the market none such thing exists for freedom allows for the ease of adjustment to new information and not the imposition of an individual's opinion on the market.      

I found an excellent quote by Steve Burns, a leading mentor and author of numerous books on trading, that clearly described the trait of traders who've mastered the understanding of survival in financial markets by saying;  

The best traders are simply slaves to the market's price action.

— Steve Burns (@SJosephBurns) September 30, 2014

The fact of it all is we might believe there's a considerable amount of freedom attached to trading for a living, a trader's real success is bound to his ability to recognize the change in behaviour of the market before committing too far into a lost cause as well as how easily he can adapt to that change.

Price, in it's rawness, is the only indicator that accurately exhibits a true reflection of the market's mood at any point in time. Mastering the skill of understanding the tone of veracity displayed in the movement of price is a major step towards accepting your view on the market is singular and possibly possesses flaws which can only be verified through the process of market action.