4 things for me: Switched to longer trading / holding period Ignored P&L during the trading week, making decisions based on what charts were saying Focused more on managing the downside, letting the market take care of the upside Stopped worrying about how to trade and focused more on what to trade, i.e. analyzing where (which asset classes) the next trends will be and getting ahead of the institutions
Those are all very great points but the first one really resonated with me, as I started working on weekly charts instead of daily charts, and everything is just a lot better now.
Hey, welcome to the dark side! Just don't let the daytraders hear you, keep it on the down low! All kidding aside, I pushed the holding period to what most here would consider extreme. The longer the holding period the more profitable it has become for me after I finally learned to be patient and hold positions for years. Here's an example if you're interested: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/anyone-else-self-sabotage.379309/page-11#post-6024502
Weekly is better because your technical may coincidentally align with fundamentals without using fundamentals at all. However, you should be afraid the robustness of your trading system using weekly timeframe if it doesn't have edge in other timeframes. Try search robustness test (upper and lower timeframes).
I actually looked into that and it doesn't apply to time frames of H4 and lower, it just gets confusing from there on but the profits have been looking better now.
I feel like holding positions for that long works a lot better for stocks and crypto-only, I think we can all agree that the promise of quick profits in markets like pairs on shorter time frames can be appeasing but it really can't be guaranteed thing too since it's difficult to get, at least that's how it was to me, plus I don't make a lot outside of this to even consider holding positions and assets for periods longer than let's say a month.
Different strokes for different folks. The thing is we are all trading the same market trends no matter the holding period, it's just different approaches, personal strengths/weaknesses and preferences. A long term holder may try to catch the entire move with one trade where as shorter term trades will take multiple trades along the same trend. Stocks, bonds, commodities and real estate can have decade plus long trends. Forex can have trends for a few years when there are major policy shifts, but governments / central banks will intervene if/when trade competitiveness gets impacted. Yes, holding assets for this long requires another set of skills, portfolio strategy & management. You need to be well capitalized and often want to trade multiple assets in different trend stages in order to have multiple options when liquidity is needed.
Does the methodology work on multiple instruments? Anyway, what instrument do you trade? Day trading system usually have more rules than swing trading system if the base/origin of the system is swing trading. What I have found so far, if the trading system origin is day trading, it usually works well on swing trading too. But not vice versa for most which explains why most trading systems that do really good on swing trading struggle/fail in day trading.
Keeping good records, and learning about statistics and probability so I could analyze them realistically and accurately enough to be able to learn how to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.