Its the exact same trading plan...exact same trading rules. Yet, two people are not exactly the same. Therefore, they will execute the exact same trading plan...differently due to cognitive reasons. They may not even trade the same trading days in any given month or year...different personal lifestyle. Reminds me one day when I lived in Seattle and there was 5 of us...sharing a trading office space. The office had a balcony and one day me and another trader were looking at the exact same cloud in the sky...a lone cloud. He then said it looked like a sofa. I took a quick look and then said it looked like a race car. Same cloud but two different perceptions due to differences in our cognitive. Just the same as two different traders using the exact same trading plan...they will apply it a little different...resulting in different trading results. Simply, exact same trade method...applied differently because the traders are not the exact same person. Each person has different experiences, different expectations, different stresses, different reaction skills, different memories, different assimilation of information...they are just different. - Behavior Finance Heck, two different traders can't even agree on the meaning of the word intuition. That's exactly my point. wrbtrader
I love this comment. Probably not why you expect. My position is that 99% of all of us traders are left-brained. But about half of us don't like to recognise this in themselves. Abandoning the labelling "discretionary" trader seems to present a threatening loss of creativity and possibly therefore profits, but certainly control over the trading process. As a minor point, it wasn't me who raised the spectre of "automatic" or "automated" trading, and that could be a revealing word use by the poster as it was put up as the alternative approach to discretionary trading. Course, some discretionary traders might be just too lazy to write down what they do. Or they might find its going to look so simple that it can't possibly be seriously a basis for a business venture. Or maybe they spent years market-watching and researching and don't like the thought that they ended up with a simple one-page strategy as the best option. But I'm half-joking with you.........
So if his analysis of the clouds was different he had a different plan for action based on the analysis. Like if you see a range and he sees a range and he plans to go short off the upper boundary and you plan to long the break-out through the upper boundary - same TA, same market, different plans.
I'm not left-brained, so this is an incorrect statement. I also don't do discretionary or mechanical trading.
Well, admittedly its just my supposition. "mechanical" ??? Jeez mate, am I going to have to fill in one of these captcha things so we all know I'm not a bot.