You have the words, but the music and poetry are missing. I am sure you are likely referring to Livermore's admonition that the sitting made him the big money. What you are missing is that he meant that allowing his profitable positions remain open made him the money - not sitting on a losing position hoping it would at some point move to a profit. I wish you well as you make a go at this tough game.
Thank you for the encouragement. This game is very tough! I totally agree with you. I hope the reward is equally big.
Trading is like putting a puzzle together. There are many pieces. Some big pieces are easy to put together initially, but some small pieces are hard to deal with. When you think you have put all pieces together, you find out it doesn't work. You have to re-arrange the pieces, or look for one more piece that is needed to complete the puzzle. When you find one more piece, you think you have located all the pieces that you need. You put them together, it still doesn't work! Re-arrange.............. Get rid of some, they are redundant, perhaps............ Oh Wait, that is needed, it should go here........... I think it will work this time. No, it still doesn't work!!! Then you do more rearrangement and it works somehow. But you don't know if it is the way it should work, until one day a disaster hits, and you know it was just an illusion. Rearrangement time.................. Today, 6/22/2013, I think I have found the last piece!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well, different people have different last pieces, depending on what pieces they already have. One man's last piece may be something collected by another man at the beginning. OK, I change my mind. Actually, all people's last pieces are the same. Because if you have this piece, it will make you profitable, I guarantee it. Jack Hershey will never know what this last piece is, that guy is clueless! Of all the posts I read on ET, that guy's posts make absolutely no sense. Zero sense! Nothing, nothing, nothing in his posts makes sense. Reading his posts makes me feel like entering a nightmare when I am having a fever. I have a the same feverish nightmare when I was reading Jesse Livermore's book. I don't know why his book was considered by many posters on ET as a must-read. Maybe they are promoting their book selling business. Think about it, the guy lost his money and killed himself eventually. He was a failure, yet everybody was promoting his book and telling others we should trade like Jesse Livermore. I have no idea why these idiots cannot think straight. If Jesse lost all his money, there must be something wrong with his trading, right? Talking about books, Trading in the Zone is considered as a must-read, but I don't understand why a loser-trader wrote some garbage and it miraculously was promoted by ET as a must-read. Why? Why? Why? Just where is the logic? You are a loser-trader, so whatever you wrote cannot be bought, because you know nothing, nothing, nothing about trading. I hate books and book writers, especially failed-trader-written books. Who is that guy who wrote some trading psychology book but his son couldn't trade profitably? Hello, it's your dad's book, you should know what he is writing about. No? You don't know what his is writing about? Or what he writes about just doesn't work? Money is made by waiting. BS. Wait? Waiting kills people. Oh yeah, I know what you are saying: waiting is to wait for an entry. Well, I have a word for you: it's hesitation! You miss the train if you wait. You can't wait, you must jump into the train, or it will leave without you! It's Saturday today, I have a little time. By the way, if any of you have trading capital but are losing it in the market, contact me. I will make money for you with a 50/50 split. I will be very rich in a couple of years. It's Saturday today, my mind is not exactly under full control. Does NSA read ET? I wonder. OK, I am going to click the submit button. If any of my words reveals any secrets of national security, I am not aware of it and will not be held responsible. But there is this trading secret I want to share: Trading in the Zone is useless! Just use your common sense, how can a loser-trader reveal anything useful about successful trading? Gee, these day, people just lost their ability of reasoning. Of course, if they keep their reasoning capability, they wouldn't be in day trading. Day trading has a failure rate of 99%, nobody in his right mind would attempt something that is 99% failure. So it is not unusual that day traders would worship a book written by a failed trader. If you are waking up a little now, think about it, most of the posters are just paper-traders, vendors, scammers, brokers, sponsors, con-artists. If they post traders of profits (I don't know why a profitable trader wants to do that), they are deceiving you. Ooops, I just said something that will get myself banned! But I will submit this post anyway. Bye my friends who are suffering. Hope you will become the 1%. But I know 99% of you will be heartbroken. This is a brutal business, my friends.
Correction: That is Not the last piece. That turned out to be useless. Thrown out. Picked up an old piece. Re-orient it, and put it back in the puzzle. Will see if it works this week.
I have the belief that good trading is actually very very simple. We complicate it in infinite ways. Good trading should be effortless and that only comes after spending a lot of time and research to find out what works for you and knowing yourself.
On that note it's nice to see you're trading with real money because that's the only way to learn what works for you and learn about yourself in my opinion
There is a piece that I played with and tried to put it in place for the puzzle for a long time. It didn't fit, so I gave it up. I thought that it was not the piece. I thought it wouldn't work. I thought that it was impossible. So I threw it away. Instead, I forced my way. I blieved that it was the only way to move ahead. I spent a long time trying to make it work. But it just didn't work. No matter what I tried. Then I spent some time figuring about the reasons. Because the solutions were unsatisfactory, the causes were discarded. That is a very bad mistake. That caused a lot of wasted time and money. I was constantly shifting among causes. I gave it a little more thinking. I tried to pinpoint the cause or causes. Then I came back to the piece that I had played with for a long time. And I believe that this is the cause. Then why did I throw it away? Because it didn't fit. why not fit, maybe because I held it in the wrong direction. If I rotate it some degrees, it may fit. And now I am working with this piece. Hopefully it will work. This happens because the other kind of solution didn't work. If the other kind of solution worked, I wouldn't be coming back to the old piece. Anyway, working on the other kind of solution took a lot of time and money. Now, looking at the current (old) piece, I have a feeling that it is the right one. Of course, during after hours, everything looks reasonable, calm, logical, pretty. Will it work when I sit down in front of an active chart? If it doesn't work, I will shift back the current solution (Actually, I did that many many many many times). Again, I think the old piece will work.