I agree with you completely up till this point. But the question isn't "why"? It ought to be, "what to do about it?" In all seriousness, it needn't be "long and deep" or even "extremenly personal". Investigate the neurophysiological structure of subjective experience ("subjective" is almost reduntant, as all "experience" is basically subjective) to understand exactly why certain people react in certain ways to certain things and what to do about it. There has been quite a lot of progress in this area. Read up some on NLP, (a quasi-scientific approach to it).
Yeah, a few people have mentioned revenge trading. I don't think that's my most pressing problem now. I mean do revenge trade but that's not that often or it's not really the root of my vices. It might be a side-effect of something more subtle and deeper... I think for me; it's just that I fail to follow my rather precise rules(that I KNOW will make $). So, I think there are only 3 ways out of it: 1) Get more discipline. That's what I've been trying to do. But it's harder than you think when you are in a groove of bad habits! 2) Use automated trading systems that you have your trading rules program and just follow the signals faithfully. 3) Use NLP/sel-help books type of stuff to "reprogram" your bad habits. I'm starting exploring all three areas... I think that these so called "bad habits" are my BIGGEST impediments. They probably are responsible for 90-95% of my mistakes! If I can master those, I'm sure I'll be a master trader. I just know I will. But how? And how soon can one change bad habits? I think ALL traders have similiar issues/problems if they dig down enough and see what the real problem is about... 99
Agree with that, was being too subjective as that was how it was for me, I was an extreme case, most wouldn't be coming from that space. Good points.
Good Post, Gnome Just doing this one step will solve a bunch of Headaches. As long as One has the Discipline to adhere to it.....
By FAR my worst days were when I tried to flip and get even. I would go so far as to say that there were a few days that significantly affected my entire years. Just last July (2001) I came in all long overnight. Pretty heavy. Gapped down against me. Waited for a bounce. Never came, so I just sucked it up and took my loss. It was a really bad loss. Should have called it a day. But instead, I decided I couldn't deal with such a bad day and had to make some of it back. So I got short. Heavy. Guess what happened then? As I was doing this, I KNEW that all my previous debacle days were doing this very same thing. Did it anyway. Me, the preacher of discipline. Well, what was a bad morning turned into such a disastrous day that it actually got me started in a multi month downward spiral. I made back a lot of it but not all of it by the end of the year. I had to slow it down and regroup. But still it resulted in my only losing 6 month period ever. The dollar amount was so devastating that day that it affected my trading (and more importantly, my income) for the rest of the year. No matter how I tried to adjust, I just couldn't get anything going for at least another month. It got into my head, and that is about as bad a result as you can get. I traded with guys that lost that kind of money regularly, but for me, it was a killer. It is all relative. For me it was a low 6 figure number. I worked with guys that sometimes had 7 figure days. But I was not one of them. I was mentally shot for quite a while. What is still scary to me is that I let it happen even though I had experienced similar days before. If I could take out my worst 5 or 6 days in the past 6 years, it would be like having another whole years income under my belt. So it is easy to talk about discipline, but like it has been said here, in the heat of battle, sometimes we just lose it. Hope I learned my lesson. But it wasn't the first time. Hopefully it was the last. Haven't done anything like it since, so I got that going for me. Which is nice
Gnome, Nice post. By high in the range or low in the range are you talking about upper half / lower half or more like over 70/80 under 30/20 for 100 scaled oscillators?
I have no self-sabotaging self destructive behaviours whatsoever! Oh, oh â why has the needle of this lie-detector gone of the scale?:eek:
Any self-sabotaging self destructive behaviours? Yes. Picking a certain part of my anatomy when losing money. I tried taping my hand to the mouse, thinking that would make me stop, but that made it even worse. You should have seen them laugh at me when I had to go to the emergency clinic for removal.
Hi Tri, The way I use this concept... I should be getting the trade on near the turn. Therefore, if it's moving up and is >50, I presume I'm already way too late and should be looking for one in the opposite direction. (Not that it doesn't continue higher... maybe a lot, maybe a little, but the risk/reward at that point is already getting out of hand.) And <50 on the way down, I should not be chasing but rather getting ready to go the other way. Regularly, I find myself thnking, "can't case NOW, look at my oscillator..." Probably has saved me a fortune. And, you can't necessarily just dive-in when the oscillator is at an extreme. Quite often, they will stay extreme or make complex tops/bottoms.