sure would be nice to see those trades....but then we'd never hear the end of "no showing after-the-fact entries/exits"....even for those who've shown real-time trades before?...pretty please....
See it all now. If I tell them they can't create success by guessing they won't listen to me, but to those who tell them success if just around the corner if only they persist. This is the cosy reassurance that everyone wants. To learn to become stubborn and closed minded is the goal, ignoring the objectivity of unsuccessful results manifest in a negative financial outcome. Losers will tell prospective losers to expect losses, and a loser will be comforted by this. If I try and show what can be achieved via teaching self responsibility, logical thinking, hard work, market concepts, example charts etc then it becomes my unwanted duty to take everyone by the hand, make live calls for them, reveal market knowledge to strangers in public, all the while conforming to other peoples rules and expectations. People have asked for calls - for me to put up or shut up. Others seek to imply that I can only read the market in hindsight not in real time, and to dispute this charge I have an obligation to prove something to them. I owe you nothing. Stop asking me for favours. If you believe I cannot be successful because you dislike the way I communicate or the content of my writings then do not bother to comment on them or contact me. Go back to your own belief system. It is the comfortable and safe thing to do. I am not asking you to do anything for me. Stop asking me to do something for you. Make the choice to believe whatever you want to believe and accept full responsibility for the outcome of your choices. My mind and my effort does not belong to you, and you are entitled to nothing that I do not freely choose to give you. I will not offer any more assistance to strangers who claim to aspire to trading success - you have all taught me not to be generous with what I have learned. I am the only person to give the best advice possible to the thread starter. Forget about trading. It isn't for you. You are going to waste time and money going nowhere. Perhaps he will remember when it is all over that he received this good advice in the very beginning - when it is too late to do him any good as he did not listen. This will be my last post on this thread so he need not threaten again to take his ball and go home. Unlike those with no self discipline and serious ego issues, I do not make more final appearances than Cher, so the thread starter can be assured of the future absence of my commentary.
The truth is we could care less what you post Blotto. However, when you post on threads like CL Journal where at the very start, it is journal for posting real time calls and you instead make up lies after the fact, you are going to get called out. Now this may make you upset, but no one is going to feel sorry for a blowhard troll.
Please, leave him alone. He stopped posting here as I asked him, don't feed him. I prefer the journal this way. Have a good weekend everybody!
That mind set comes out of a lot of frustration (and reading Trading in the Zone at least three times). Those questions (Is it a real signal? Should I filter it? Should I take it? What if it is a loser?) are your mind's way of protecting you from risk. I imagine it's genetic programming to avoid unnecessary risk and our brain will do its best to protect us by getting us to ask those kinds of questions. As a day trader we have no time for that, so we learn to recognize our chosen setups and to act on them without question. You called that long signal right after we connected Thursday. I asked where you'd place your stop and you said 15 ticks, same on all trades. I said that was unnecessary, you could have a stop of between 4 and 8 ticks on your entry, no need to risk extra money using a flat stop. I then told you the price level that would trigger my long entry which was 13 ticks from your entry and would require a 17 tick stop. The fear of losing that much (plus possible slippage) didn't keep me out of a great with-trend setup because I trust my plan. I was surprised to find that you weren't in that trade at your excellent entry price, because this was the second or third time I've observed your strategy and it's rock solid. Successful trading requires trust in our system and the ability to accept losers along the road to net profitability. In the hour or so we spoke I had six trades. Did I have any losing trades? Yes. Was that a problem? No. It's only a problem if fear of losing keeps you from trading all the valid setups. There's a quote I have on my wall so I always see it as I trade: "Leap, and the net will appear!" When you say, "Here is my long entry signal @ 92.92," just put on the trade, no thinking allowed!
Daamn. I knew there was a problem. I read the Trading in the Zone only twice. More reading is needed. I did not mind missing the trades while we were talking, it was more important to listen to you and your points while watching the same PA. and learn. There is another problem, that the signals still have a degree of discretion. I am reducing it now. When the basic signal starts to appear there are 13 different things which can invalidate the signal, and 2-3 of those only become clear when the bar finishes and others are too subjective, giving me a licence to avoid the trade. If it were clear cut than it would be easy to program it, and easy to follow it like a robot. But now this problem is being addressed and signals will be simplified. Also, I am making out with my charts and studying the PA stops and other aspects we were talking about. It is sure will be easier to take a trade if the stop is half or less than what I use now.
Nodoji your thoughts regarding Mark Douglas's suggestion to commit x amount of dollars to doing 20 trades (I think thats what it was) to the best of your ability to develop confidence in yourself. The focus being on taking the nest 20 trades come hell or highwater. Not on the money. He was using a simple system that had definite entry signals, leave discretion out of the equation as much as possible
At some point I believe you have to do that exercise to prove to yourself that you have the mental fortitude to trade the plan you tested on paper/demo. I'd been with a group of Skypers all day every day for a few months, had honed a strategy from the ground up during that time, transforming it into something that I was able to put in writing with fixed rules for entry, risk management and exits. But it was clear that I struggled to get over the picking choosing/micromanagement angle of trading. So I hardly ever had a loss, but I missed many great moves and had strings of break even trades that would've been fine had I left the trade alone. I was afraid to go long if price went "too high" and afraid to short if it went "too low". I sometimes sat out through several more legs of a trend, waiting for a reversal signal. Daily post-market analysis of application of my trading plan demonstrated that I could and should be extracting a lot more from the market in a way that required very little thinking while trading. I was frustrated day after day about my inability to just trade all valid setups. If you have a robust trading plan, eventually the frustration of missed profits overcomes the relief of missed losses and you truly come to believe that "anything can happen and you don't need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money". The trade CLM and I have referenced during our conversation above was a long setup that came after 4 pushes off overnight lows with price having run 160 ticks. The bar prior to the inside bar that set up the long signal broke out 30 ticks through the last high and price was "due" for decent pullback. It didn't feel particularly comfortable buying so high without a stronger pullback. It felt like maybe it would be a trap for new longs and even if price did break that previous new high (which was not very far from our entry levels) it wouldn't break out very far after running up so much. The "picking and choosing" trader is thinking, "Nah, not worth going long here, let's wait for a better pullback" or "This will be a trap or a failed breakout, let's fade this one". But trading all setups we're thinking, "Here's a long setup, place the order." The unlikely result was a breakout of 50 ticks from the previous high, meaning even waiting for full confirmation of strength by buying a tick above the previous swing high offered more profit potential than all the earlier, easier setups. So imagine you're a pure breakout trader, only buying a tick above previous swing highs in a defined uptrend. You buy an earlier breakout and it runs 10 ticks and fails for a break even or small losing trade; you buy the next one and it fails even worse, so probably a small loss; you buy the next one and scalp 20 ticks out of the 31 tick breakout. Ahhh, you have a small profit now and there's no way you're going to blow it by buying the next one because price is definitely "due" for a stronger pullback first. And so you miss the chance to take a chunk of a 50 tick move. That's the problem with messing with a trading plan. That's what Mark Douglas spends an entire book trying to get across. His book is like the trader's bible, you need to read it over and over again to keep the concepts fresh.
2nd week finished. Not pretty. There were 9 trades 3 scratches and 6 losers, no winners . Exit strategy was followed, but did very badly in trade selection. (I should not have been selecting and filtering really) The rules are simplified and discretion was reduced so next week it will not be easy to filter good setups.
No trades today. London was chop-chop today. Before open I had a signal at a trend line, so it was filtered, and completely overlooked another one before pit close.