Today I was onsite doing analytics consulting at a client site. I missed out on this monster move. I've been practicing and researching the charts over the weekend. I was pretty convinced that Monday it would have a high probability of going down. But then I was at a client site doing work and couldn't log into IB. This was the kind of day I've been training and waiting for. Short and hold! That's the tradeoff. Hard to ride 2 horses to town. Right now I need the stability of a biz/job since I'm not good enough to do full-time trading. But it still hurts to miss out on a good day. I guess I could go to the bathroom and log into IB and short. It's not the same. Too risky without my desktop setup and charts I have at home. Man, I need to build trading systems so it can trade for me!
I trade about 100 instruments (70 futures contracts, a dozen Forex crosses, and few dozen ETFs/stocks.) I let the setups come to me & don't end up forcing trades that aren't there. This simplifies my trading & keeps me from over trading - I am only in when the reward to risk is skewed sharply in my favor. You see that about 1-3 times per year - per symbol.
I don't know if you have notice this, but you come off as "whiney". I'm sure some other people on this forum missed out too. Maybe even a few have lost money. Some might have blown up already. But you know what they don't do? Is come here and whine about it. I know you're the OP of this thread and all. But if you want to whine can you just start a thread in the Journal section and do it there? With that at least have the decency to give us the option to choose to read your posts or not.
That's an option we all have, all the time, to be fair. I saw nothing "whiney" in the thread, myself - just an interesting discussion of a subject which I'm slightly surprised not to have seen discussed here before, and in which I was pleased to take part.
I can't really use the Ignore button. It takes time and effort to login all the time so people's post would appear no matter what. He does come off "whiney" to me. It's a lot of I missed this or that. I need to do this or that. I have these issues that keeps me from becoming successful. Excuses and very little problem solving going on I think.
I have one or two pattern I use that unifies all patterns out there. You could call it the "holy grail" of patterns if you wish. The One ring that rules Them all. Hehe.
I view ET as a form of community where fellow traders share their joys, missed opportunities, failures, etc. A common issues that all traders face. Collective therapy if you will. If you find that form of sharing as whiney then you can think it as so. But I'm glad there are others like @Xela are here to listen, help, and offer advice. We are all in this journey together.
There are probably about 100-200 ET members here. You reference @Xela that is helping you. She is one out of 100. The others are keeping quiet. What do you think that say? The truth from my perspective is you want to be a trader which is a profession that have absolutely no value to society. You wants to gain the ability to make fast easy money with little effort. If you wanted to be a doctor to save lives or cure cancer it would be a different story and there would be a reason to try to help you. But the aspiring to be a trader and thinking you're obligated that other people should help you gets no sympathy from me. I'm sure the rest of society will agree with me. I knew very well that no one was going to help me early on. PS during my time it was a lady named NoDoji that was "helping" me. Hehe.
While you are probably right in a general sense though with moralistic overtones, I think you are mistaken the very premise of my postings and perhaps all of ET. A lot of time I and probably many others post not always seeking help but more of an open discussions. Like hey guys, here I am a budding trader I face some questions. What do you guys think? No one can really help anyone be a better trader by merely writing suggestions on ET. The individual themselves have to do the hard work of working on themselves and improving. But ET represents a community of like minded individual on this trading journey. Corners of it are not as noble. So my postings are not necessarily supplication of help. But more of discussions and ideas to bounce around. This is the same criticism people have of the self-help book industry. It's a great read, but the reader must do the hard work of acting on those advice in order to improve their lives. No one can make anyone a better trader. Just like no one can improve anyone by offering self-help advice. Now as to your point about being a doctor, if I wanted to be a doctor then I wouldn't be on this forum would I? I would go to aspiring doctors forums, etc. For the record, in my analytics consulting biz I'm helping businesses understand their data better, make better decisions through insights from data by building analytics and models, etc. I think that has provided more "value to society" than what you are doing since you are presumably a full-time trader. Don't be need sanctimonious and holier than thou. Also, there's nothing wrong being a trader. We live in a capitalistic society. This is a crucial function. You wrote, "she is one out of 100. The others are keeping quiet. What do you think that say?" That said some people are busy doing their own things. Some people like to offer advice. That's all. Why make it so personal? Lighten up.