Why would somebody take a trade and then start a thread with such a title...Going down with the ship... masochism? Aphie could have chosen many other ways to hurt himself... alcohol, tobacco, abusive relationship, reckless driving...etc... He decided to give his money to others. His altruism deserves our sympathy.
My 2 cents Be committed to your trading plan. It is childish behavior to jump around from one trading strategy/method/system to another. How many child traders are there in this world? The type of trading you choose whether scalping, day, swing, position, options, futures, stocks should fit your personality and your pocket book and should be decided upon before putting money in the game. The lion, even if hungry, does not graze on grass STICK TO YOUR PLAN! Or in your case create a plan! Trading without a plan is like sowing seeds in the sand, there will be no fruit.
This is the principal reason why this book had to address the areas of personal transformation in such depth: you need to know if there is any damage, how to identify it, and most important, how to release yourself from it. The disciplined trader, Mark Douglas Douglas wrote somewhere: "Be gentle with yourself" Just 4 words that got me thinking quite a bit... i wish you good luck ik
originally posted by daniel ------------------------------------------------------ and at this stage, you've shown but the barest trace of a conceptual bridge between the saying and the all-important doing... come on bro... this is getting painful... so let me, for one last time, attempt to dispell any remnants of grand illusion about the trading lifestyle you might be harboring: this is fuckin serious shit, it demands fuckin serious attention and requires fuckin serious committment.. anything less than that and you are seriously fucked! your heretofore lax "it's cool daddio, 2pts a day? no sweat.." attitude is not only highly deluded, it's an affront to humanity! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nothing more needs to be said. The above says it all. Well said Daniel And if anyone does less, your account balance will be the final judge. Just check in now and then with the balance and you will know how you are doing.
I want to take a step back and, after next week and the options settle out, review where I've gone so far. If it doesn't go my way, I will be out around 20%. That is the mark where I am going to stop and ask myself just what the hell it is I'm doing. The market is a huge place, and perhaps there is a ton of money to be made in other places besides speculating. Perhaps I will find that I can't speculate worth shit, in which case I will have to observe simultaneous markets and find out if there are other ways to make money that are low-risk / high-reward. I refuse to believe that, based on the size of all world markets, there aren't a few less-known strategies still around to perhaps arb something and make a killing. We'll see how this plays out ...
That is the key statement, "I refuse to believe...." Better men than you have died still looking for the Holy Grail of making money in the markets. I suspect that even if you did find some system, you would not have the mental and emotional tools to be able to execute on it when things went against you....which they always do at some point and time. You think it is about trading and finding some angle, I think it is about discipline and maturity. You continue to look for shortcuts to avoid doing the hard work, and I suspect that is the pattern in most every area of your life. Perhaps you can avoid the hard emotional work that is needed to mature and succeed........but I doubt it.
jeeezus... with all this deliberation over the efficacy of one solitary IBM trade you'd think the fate of the world rested on the outcome... the point isn't whether or not the ibm trade is a good one (i'm sure all the gurus bashing it have taken the opposite side - yeah right!)... the point is that it was just an ad hoc "hmm, this looks good" spur of the moment thing... like a maiden waltzing through the countryside, stopping to smell whatever flower tickles her fancy... which, in my not so humble opinion, is no way to make it in this biz... if you wanna play at being george soros or jim rogers, .. ok, great... then it's time to hit the books and get a solid economic grounding... then your reasons are real reasons, not psychological rationalisations.. and yes, you are right, there are almost countless ways to make it with options... do you REALLY think you know what you're doing with them? seriously? bro, i bet you haven't got the slightest... when you can understand and explain everything in a book like McMillan, and have the know how to execute the trades, you can probably start to formulate some strategies... until then, it's just guesswork and luck...
that dumbass prick did not curve the lines on his chart. Will we ever be released from the stranglehold of wondering how stupid can this guy really be? I think the mystery lies within the premise that he really is 24 or whatever he says he is. I think he is probably in high school and more like 15 or 16. Reading Aphex's posts from this perspective sheds a new light on why his posts sound the way they do.