You've received a great deal of advice, Cathy, and you'll receive a great deal more. I hesitate to add to the pile. But you do seem to be on a continuing search for someone who can tell you what to do. Finding another mentor is not likely to be of much help, if any. Emotional issues aside, I suggest you spend some time just watching charts. By that I don't mean studying charts or looking at charts. I mean watching them form in real time. Try to get a sense of why price moves as it does, why it hesitates or turns where it does. Once you've developed that understanding, then indicators and patterns may be of use to you, but you may also find that they are irrelevant. Without that central understanding, however, I doubt that any system will do for you what you want it to do. That's the extent of my contribution to the pile, such as it is.
That is a great contribution DB. I have decided to stop looking for a guru. Somewhere inside I have the answers if I only trust my own judgement. Like right now, I took a trade based on a rising double bottom on a 15 min chart and it worked fine. I like patterns because they help me set natural stops and targets.
Actually none of the above. I get upset because I need the money to pay for our monthly bills and it frustrates me when I lose. Trading for a living is a perfect fit for someone who lives on a boat and likes to move around every few years. Also the freedom is perfect for me because with Bob's illnesses, my life is not predictable. I need to be able to drop everything with no notice and run with him to emergency. I know this is in my blood. I have stopped live trading and paper traded for 6 months twice while working on systems. Every time I have problems, I take a few days off to study. I am the soul of cheap living. Good gracious, my toy is this computer. Our car and our boat are old and cheap. My clothes come from an outlet or Kmart. I buy one pair of shoes a year. Bob does all the work on the boat when he feels well or it gets left for later if he doesn't. At 50, there is nothing left to prove to others. Who really cares? LOL. Cathy PS....Zen is how I hang on.
Trading is a process of personal creativity. You have mentioned several profitable traders. I bet each of them has found/created at least one strategy that matches his/her personality. That may account for their success. Do these strategies match your personality? Trading is an "Art". It should be discretionary. A good pianist may not be a good painter. A good painter may be a poor sculptor. I guess: a) an excellent daytrader may not be a good position trader. b) a successful E-mini scalper may be a poor option trader, and vice versa. Hence, don't limit yourself to daytrading or one type of instrument . Just my two cents.
Yes, I look for patterns to do daily swing trades from now. Swinging for the bleachers instead of bunting. I am hesitant about overnight trading. The world scares me.:eek:
Bobcathy, I believe the above statement to be the most important advice yet. Great post DB. Cathy, trading real money with the guru of the month club is doing your psyche some real damage. Step back for a while but don't quit, observe the market in real-time and follow DB's advice. Sometimes more indicators, more charts, more oscillators, more trade set-ups, more gurus, more Fibonacci, more Gann, more squiggly lines, more.....etc..... is just more..... not better. Take a step back. Do not commit any more funds right now. BUT DON'T QUIT. Your moment may come at any time. Best Regards, Dave Scott
It sounds like you are putting a LOT of pressure on yourself to succeed... no wonder you are emotional. If you are undercapitalized and have to make unrealistically large profits to get by, that would have a lot to do with your emotional stress. Add on top of that the fact that you seem like the primary money earner, and the fact that you did not already establish a pattern of profitability before trying to live off of trading, and you have a boatload of pressure (no pun intended ). Even though it's not ideal, you might want to try not living on a boat for a while, and find some additional work outside of trading (if possible). That would take some of the pressure off of you to make money trading, and would probably help your profitability immensely. Then if and when you established consistent profits (let's say for 12 months in a row), you could try trading full-time again. I guess it's up to you... but it is very difficult to be emotionally detached when there are outside pressures affecting your trading and forcing you to attempt to achieve an unrealistic return just to get by. One more thing: even though you haven't talked about this, I assume that you have a good money management and risk control system. You simply cannot be profitable over the long term if you take too much risk on each trade. You can have excellent emotional control and a great, reliable entry/exit system, but if you don't manage your trade size properly you will still lose in the end.
Cathy, Before you finalize your decision one way or another, I'd like to bring a couple of points to your attention. First, do you look at volume at all? If not, you may wish to do so. Until a few years ago, I ignored volume for the most part, and I paid dearly for it. Further, when I began to look more closely at volume I disregarded the conventional wisdom and found my own way. I think that if you study the volume patterns in conjunction with price, you might find that some readily accepted "truisms" are not entirely true. Second, I note from your prior journal that you used indicators. Have you considered avoiding indicators, or at least those with "look-back" periods? When I began reading about the markets years ago, I was enamored of indicators. However, I quickly found them to be of no use to me personally in my trading regardless of how much I tweaked them. They simply lack the kind of reliabilty I need to trade comfortably. One of my continuing weaknesses is that I can unwind fairly quickly after a series of consecutive losses. Therefore, I need far more reliabilty than any indicator can give me. Had I continued to focus on indicators, I have no doubt that I would no longer be trading today. They may work reliably for some people, but I'll be darned if I know how. My hat is off to them, but I prefer my own game. And yes, I am presently profitable. Finally, I would be very cautious about tutors, mentors or gurus. Simply because they may claim to be profitable does not necessarily make it so. And even if some of them are indeed profitable, I still believe that the long-term solution is to find your own way. It is difficult to walk away from a dream. Should you ultimately decide to do so, I hope that you do so with the knowledge that you gave it your very best shot. Good luck in whatever you decide is right for you.