In September, TopstepTrader’s blog is all about helping you become a better trader day-by-day. Each day, we’ll be bringing you new ideas — whether those are quotes, tips, tricks, market insights or stories of other traders. You’ll benefit regardless of whether you are trading in your own brokerage account or trying to earn our capital in the Trading Combine.

We are also launching exclusive content in our Private Facebook Group (go here to join). So whether you are coming back to the markets after a summer break or if you’ve been trading all along, there will be something for you.

Without further ado, here’s our first day… the one thing you have to know to trade better.

Trading is not a get-rich-quick opportunity.

Repeat that again: trading is not a get-rich-quick opportunity. So if you were attracted to TopstepTrader as a place that will help you get rich by 2019, then you should not trade with us. In fact, you should really not trade at all. Nothing good will happen.

Why? When we try to make money fast, we do dumb things.

We over trade. We feel like to make money, we always have to be in a trade. So we have strategy drift and start placing trades that don’t make sense.

Then we revenge trade. We take opportunities that aren’t really opportunities and try to force the market to do what we want, instead of focusing on what it wants to do.

Then we let hope enter the equation, leading to losses after losses.

And finally, we over leverage our account to make it all back.

That's a recipe for one thing: a blown up account and a pissed off trader.

So, today, we want you to put those grandiose dreams of retiring on your trading income aside. Don’t try to make $1 million trading next year. Heck, don’t try to make $100,000. Don’t target a number at all.

Instead, do this: realize that trading is a profession. It’s something that all the trading greats say (we should know, we’ve talked to a lot of them).

In order to make $100,000 a year, you have to average $400 in profits every trading day. To do that, you have to first be able to average $100 in profits. And for some of us, to do that, we have to first stop losing money.

Each of these steps are real progress. And they will take time. So stop thinking of trading as a get-rick-quick opportunity and start realizing it is an endeavor that will take effort and time.

This month is all about walking you through how you can start to get better every day.

It will take time. But you can do it.