There are three things that a share trader needs to understand if he is going to make money on a consistent basis in the market. These are the concepts of prosperity, survival and mentoring.

The concept of prosperity is a mindset. You will not prosper if you have a poverty mindset. You need to believe that you have the right to prosper. You need to believe that you have the right to be a winner. You need to understand the principles of money management from a prosperity mindset and not from a poverty mindset. This may sound strange to you, but it is crucial to being a successful trader.

The reason it is necessary for you as a trader to have a prosperity mindset is unless you know how to handle large sums of money you will find yourself making decisions which will cause you to lose more money than necessary. A prosperity mindset will prevent you from entering into a losing spiral that causes you to lose everything you have made. You might think that this does not happen, but when people go from being just an average player to becoming very wealthy, not being able to function from a prosperity mindset often becomes their downfall.

One person I knew went from being broke to a multi-millionaire in just a couple of years. However, his new found wealth got the better of him and he started making decisions from a poverty mindset rather than a prosperity mindset and was not able to break out of his downward spiral back to poverty.

The idea of survival may not seem worth taking on board, because you want to prosper not just survive. Yet if you cannot survive when things are tough, there is no way you are going to prosper. If fact, one young man told me that he did not need to learn how to survive, he just wanted to know how to prosper. In the good times, things just came easy for him. But when things got too difficult, he could not cope with the effort that was required in learning how to survive. It just seemed so futile to working so hard just to keep his head above the water, when beforehand he was accumulating wealth without doing anything really. When you are in a bull market and shares are going up, you will congratulate yourself of your excellent trading simply because you were buying shares and they were going up in value, just like the rest of the market. The difficulty is when the high tide goes out. If you haven't learnt how to survive at low tide in a bear market, you are not going to be trading very long. The same applies if you have not learnt to trade in a choppy sidewards market.

If you have learnt how to survive in bear markets and markets trading sidewards, then you will be able to prosper. Learning how to survive is the key to being a winner. One of the problems many novice private traders face is not knowing how to survive in the markets during the tough times. This can be rectified by either doing an apprenticeship or finding a mentor, which is effectively the same as doing the apprenticeship.

When people do apprenticeships, they have a mentor. Apprentices are usually assigned to a tradesman or a master, which is the same as a mentor. The apprentice's mentor not only demonstrates how to do the job but also can cover up any mistakes made. This luxury is not afforded to you as a private trader, even if you have a mentor. However, having a mentor to guide you and show you how to make money on the markets, so you can survive the tough times, and help you keep the right mindset during the heady times, will ensure that you become a successful trader.