You need to work on discipline. I would recommend practicing in your private life. Try taking something you enjoy and limit it to a predetermined time. Take a food or drink you enjoy and set some rules around it and live by them. Try it with an exercise program or watching TV. Make a set of rules around some activity and practice. You need to experience and accept denial.
I disagree, paper trading can be helpful to practice the mechanics of entering and exiting a trade but little more. I wrote about paper trading in an earlier post http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2533652#post2533652 If you want to train the emotions, trade with the smallest size trade possible. 100 dia or at Oanda for a micro-fx size trade. As soon as you have 'real money', regardless how small the trade, on the table a different part of the brain is used to manage the trade. Then slowly increase the position size over time. There is also a number of books on discipline by James Loehr, "Toughness Training for Life" and "Mental Toughness Training for Sports". He is a famed sports psychologist. His description of overtraining, undertraining, and recovery from an injury (market loss for a trader) is very good. The books used are about a $1 each. Just like sports competition or flying trading is a 'performance skill'. The cool head with a weak system will beat a hot head with a better system almost every time. Indicators and systems are talked about because they promise an easy path to success and are easily sold to the unsuspecting public. Good luck!
Yeah, Mercor, it sounds right. I hope I will solve it with automated trading. As I said somewhere else, whenever there's a rule, even if I created it, I feel the need to break it. But I do have some discipline, like I brush my teeth, and so on. I am very orderly and everything. But you have a point about learning to say and accept a "no" from yourself. Well, slacker, paper trading vs real trading will affect your trading and emotions in a different way, I agree. But like others said, if you can't make it with paper trading, then you can't make it with real trading either (the opposite may not be true, as your post implies). So the point I am stressing out is that there is no reason to start with real money unless your method works in paper trading first.
Hey man, if you found something that you can enjoy and make money doing then who cares if you do it automated or by hand. You're succeeding at your craft and that's all that matters. If you need to piss away money when you don't trade automated then that is precisely why you no longer trade that way. You should credit yourself with realizing your problem and being able to put it to an end. Best of luck... Hope you make it big with your system.
Thank you. For now I would be content if I actually kept my promise (like smokers do) to have quit for good discretionary trading. Then the second achievement would be to simply not have any bad surprises from my systems. I think it's going to be downhill from here. I also need to find some alternative pastimes besides writing on this forum, because I could be banned for writing too much.
hi i've said this before elsewhere - my answer to 'self sabotage' type behaviuor, fear of pulling the trigger etc was to read all of ruth barons roosevelts books she is a trader and mentor to traders and her books are fantastic - i thought my problems were soley pychological however it turns out i had a shit strategy as well!!! so you have to work at it from both angles.
hi her books are sold on amazon or traders press here is a link http://www.traderspress.com/authorsResults.php?S_authorID=54&Search2=Start+Author+Search