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On your way to work (or the next time you're out of the house), stop and notice what the first person you see is wearing. Now imagine that you needed to wear those clothes, those exact clothes in that exact size, at your job every day. How would that affect your performance?

Maybe you got lucky, and the first person you saw was the same gender and size as you. But their clothes probably still wouldn't fit quite right. You'd be a bit uncomfortable, and likely to underperform somewhat compared to your peak potential. When trading stocks, futures, options, or foreign currencies, your trading system should be as personal as your clothes.

A trading system tells you when to purchase and when to sell. If it's a worthy trading system, it will also tell you how much to purchase and sell.

There are a lot of individuals claiming to have a "Hugely Profitable Trading System!!!!" Normally, once you pay the fee and actually try to trade this system, it doesn't work out nearly as well for you. That's because nearly every trading system has some small amount of room for "the trader's discretion." Unless you're trading a purely mechanical, automated, hands-off system, you, as the trader, are always involved in the decision making process.

Suppose your trading system is highly aggressive, but you're not feeling confident today. So you ignore a few "buy" signals on what appear to be risky trades. Sounds harmless enough, but as soon as you don't do something your system tells you to do, you've broken the system. This is why it's best to come up with your own personalized trading system.

Now I'm not suggesting you need to come up with something nobody has ever seen before. But you do need to pick and choose from the various strategies available to build a system that matches your personality. Nobody else can do this for you. Some individuals can deal with a bit more risk, so they like to have a position in the market at all times. Others like to lurk and wait for the sure-thing, making only a couple of trades a month.

As you survey the many training products out there for traders, try to find the ones that teach you strategies and techniques rather than a particular system. Focus on putting together the building-blocks of a worthy system. It's ok to follow somebody else's system for a while to see how you like it (I recommend doing so in a simulator). But, always remember that as soon as you take (or abstain from) any action dictated by that system your no longer trading somebody else's "Proven Money-Making System!", you're trading your own derivation of that system which may or may not be profitable.

Through careful self examination, thought, and testing, you can create a trading system that works for you.