There are many unsuccessful traders as there are many overweight people (!). To lose weight you simply have to put in your body less calories than you burn. Surely you achieve it by either reducing your calorie intake, or by increasing your calorie expenditure, or both. So why are still so many overweight people? Maybe they don't know this. Or maybe they don't believe it. Or maybe they don't have the will. Or maybe they don't have the patience. Or maybe they like to be fat (!). It may be the same thing with your trading method and the loser traders ... (?). For most traders who try them your methods, and your posts are just a mental workout program. They shouldn't jump into real money trading, but stick to competitions with entertainment value like: who draws the nicest, or complicated, or imaginative chart? or who is a bigger asshole toward the newbies of this methods? or who is the greatest pretender? etc. ... Still, it would be nice to be able to help the worthy ones ... to lose weight ... and to get rich ...
Simple. . . . Something is broken and until it is fixed someone cannot be successful at weight loss. If the mind is faulty then all the weight loss programs are failures waiting to happen. You have to fix the persons mindset first and correct all their beliefs. It starts with basic education of anatomy and behavior. Then on to further understanding triggers to failure. These principles must be addressed first before physical and nutritional education can be successful. People who go extreme and take on gastric bypass will experience the weight loss desired only to face failure as time passes because the behavior of the person has not been fixed. It is a mind set up for failure. Bad habits must be addressed. Repeated cycles of gains and losses will be experienced until the mind is fixed first. This is the most important step at winning.
TradeWrecker, thanks for starting this thread. Interesting questions you raise. It's the same reason football coaches are all former football players and public speaking trainers come from acting and not research labs. Like public speaking or football, controlling emotions is a skill, it's not science. To learn a skill one doesn't need to know scientific basis behind the training method. As long as the method works, it's good enough. Also people find it easier to relate to someone who experienced the subject (like coping with fear of public speaking or fear of a trading loss) themselves rather than to a person who studied hundreds of traders and people with fear of public speaking but never traded or had fear of speaking to large groups of people themselves. I think the reason for this is every trader (at least occasionally) experiences empotions while trading. So, this is the subject everyone on these forums can relate to. On the other hand, behaviorial finance ( broadly, how emotions of idividual marklet perticipants translate into price action) is a very specialised subject with very small proportion of traders basing their ttrading strategy on it. Similarly, there is much fewer posts on pair trading than in ES Journal alone. Far fewer traders engage in pair trading. Kepping risk low helps but it doesn't resolve psychological difficulties completely. Imagine paper trading where no real monetary gain or loss is involved. Imagine one sets a goal to have 5 consequitive profitable (on paper) weeks before he or she starts trading real money. Here you immediately get a fear of having a loosing week, which will mean one will have to start the 5-week cycle again from week one. Similarly, peopel trading in smaller size may have fear of not making enough to pay the bills. This is very true...
Being mindful of what emotions one experiences is a necessary part of learning to keep emptions in check, isn't it? I think lot of more experienced traders downplay the role of psychology in trading in an attempt to talk about trading as a good mentor. Naive interpretation of books like Trading in the Zone is that the psychological factor is the main reason any trader isn't profitable. While in reality having discipline and emotions sorted out won't create profitability in absence of any edge or trading plan. So, people experienced at mentoring traders emphasise finding a profitable trading method is the most important priority. The underlying idea is a sound trading signal can be derived completely mechanically from the market data without any subjectivity. If a signal involves subjectivity, then psychology starts playing an important role.
500 is indeed overkill for covering a few simple ideas. The reason is in psychlogy of publishing. Most people feel better paying $50 for a book 500 pages long than for a book 20 pages long. Hence book authors have to add all the mumble and and hide the important ideas in it so as to satisfy what mass market demands.
I know this is out of topic... but do you mind sharing what you did to establish a track record at the time? Did you run a hedge fund incubator, get personal trading account audited, become a CTA?
There is one thing that puzzles me regarding this statement. If simple, transparent, non-subjective and profitable trading systems are easily available, why doesn't everyone automate them using something like NinjaTrader (no programming knowledge is required) and eliminate emotions altogether? Any thoughts?