Yes, at times I experienced what he claimed. My consistency had more to do with my own personal psychology. I’d get cocky, stop logging and the gambler in me would attempt to wing it, other times I would succumb to greed by focusing more on reward than on risk. There are also personal relationship issues that took me off center. Why wouldn’t I return to it after sorting personal issues? Well, that’s a bit complicated with several different factors and a conundrum. Other markets became more interesting (btc, crypto, NFTs) where 10-1000x got me profit drunk and increased my risk appetite. I’ve met liquidated and they are no fun, also met it’s friends scammed, rugged and rekted. I dare say made a fortune and lost a fortune. Now licking my wounds from that, doing therapy and rebuilding my accounts with more emphasis on protecting capital. I have way more gambling and reckless tendencies than I was aware of. Jack’s work gave me an experience of what is possible. In my development, understanding markets in greater detail is what inspired me to explore other markets, perspectives and tools instead of falling back on something I knew. There were questions I had that kept me exploring; so PVT -> SCT -> RDBMS -> PA -> MP -> VP -> FP. My path led me to distill all that into simple Price Action and swing points. Folks solely motivated by money won’t understand and think my response to you is bs. Is it a grail? Well, it depends. I consider the grail to be something internal. To think of something external as “the grail”, misses the plot. I’m referring to the parable of transformation not the legend of the cup that captured Christ’s blood as he was stabbed while crucified. It’s not a system that makes an accomplished trader, an experienced trader can make any system work. As for your last questions, those are contextual. I would qualify that YM leading ES is primarily seen ”during times of change.” With Volume leading price, PRV is essential to determine how a bar builds and where the trend is in the sequence of events. Those are general answers, more specific require an annotated chart. Take it for what you will, I have my experience, you have yours - me reiterating what I’ve already said or arguing is simply a waste of time and just increases everyone’s ignore list.
I assume everyone have experienced that. As soon as we get complacent and sloppy, the market throws us a punch. I think walking a tightrope at dizzying heights is an apt analogy for (day) trading the markets. Thank you for your honest reply. It's not an unusual story. Didn't quite understand the part about ignore list. My ignore list is empty and I have no intention of adding anyone to it. If people disagree with me or even flat out call me a f''king c''nt, I have no problem with that. Words hold no power over me.
Your welcome, thank you for the respectful questions. lol, great image Yeah, we are in different camps about the ignore list. In going through Jack's old threads, it was necessary to reduce noise - the list is quite long probably close to ~600 or so. Ninety nine percent being trolls whom either washed out or no longer around. I'm much more picky about curating what my thinking is exposed to. Negative opinion based commentary that offer no substantial value, is just time wasted.
It would be fantastic, but obviously unrealistic, if people would just be honest about where they are. Example: I've studied market profile/Al Brooks/Jack Hershey/FuturesTrader71/-insert some other name or methodology- for a while, but I'm still not making money. It has helped me increase my understanding of the market, but I'm still not a successful or rich trader using said methodology. It could be issues of my own and that I'm simply not applying it correctly or understanding it correctly, but I think it holds value. Maybe I just need more time and experience. So, study at your own discretion. Instead, what you often see on ET is people who are "teaching" or espousing various methods and implying that they're successful doing so. It's not uncommon with multi-nicks doing this either. One of the Al Brooks guys have at least 4 nicks that I know of, the last one where he pretended to be a newbie and was going to show everyone how good progress he was making with the Al Brooks method, but escaped once again as he was busted. Maybe he have a new one now. I'm not reading so much these boards these days... The most incredible story is the guy (I can supply the nick) who was mentoring some other newbie with his method and then it was found out that the guy mentoring and the mentee was the same person. Just incredible... This is a huge disservice to your common man - possibly leading him astray and wasting his time. There's many methods and approaches that are very interesting, but don't hold up to scrutiny for live trading. And that's all that matters from the traders perspective wanting to make money in the markets. At the end of the day, losing money in the market is a personal choice. Yes, it's a choice you yourself is making. Know that. You can easily choose to not lose by not trading if you don't have a valid method to back your trading such that you can expect to make money. The choice and responsibility is entirely yours. Know that and get it into your thick skull and don't come here crying like a baby when you lost all your money.
I find it interesting that Sprout blames his lack of consistent success on himself. Of course all of us can see how a losing trade, after the fact, was maybe not the perfect setup and didn't follow every rule. So its easy to internalize the error. But perhaps what we are really doing is trying our hardest to protect the idea that there is a system out there that will guarantee our financial freedom if we just become more disciplined. Heaven forbid that we even think that none of these systems are really all that magical, and since we are predicting a future event, there is only so much predictive power we can have. When we have a good string of wins, we assume we are doing our job well and sticking to the rules, and yet when we start losing money, we look for any reason to blame ourselves, so that we can protect the mighty system. The one thing that I liked from that link of the guy who made 18 million in 2020 was that he said you have to be very comfortable with losing. If we take the realistic view that we will lose half of our trades, and knowing that in a regular distribution there will easily be 5, 6, 7 or more losses in a row, and accept that this is normal, maybe we will do a better job of accepting the reality that is trading. If instead we blame ourselves for these losses and now slow down or go down a different path, looking for something better, we end up getting further and further away from our goal.
I think Kristjan Kullamägi said his win rate was as low as 30 % but with his winners being 10x his losers that's no problem at all. It all comes down to your R/R ratio, market and trading system, IMO. High win rate system tends to have inverted R/R ratios, so when you have a loss it can sting and you know that your average profit isn't that large, so it might take you some time to "make back" your losses. Especially if you just increased your size. The best systems have a high positive R/R ratio and a high win rate, but obviously this is for the few. I do think it's possible, though. Maybe that's the standard @Sprout holds himself to. Low win rate systems might be better, but you absolutely have to make sure that you do run your winners when you get one. If not, you'll have a low win rate with equal winners/losers and you'll simply lose. Psychologically, I think we're hardwired to run our losses and cut our winners short. So, this is certainly one of the reasons why most people simply lose in the trading game.
While there is merit to what you say, I know from my own personal experience, my issues are my issues and independent of whatever system I'm using. Some systems are more accurate models of market behavior. ymmv
1000%.... I almost want multiple accounts where I open a bunch of trades in each with a small stop but huge profit. Eventually, one trade will hit a 100 ES point winner, but no way I can sit through it if I'm watching.
Hello Laissez Faire, I agree with you 1000% Only a FOOL loses his/her money trading. Only a FOOL thinks someone is going to show them in real time exactly how to make a lot of money trading. Once I figured out those 2 sentence above, my trading life has been so much easier and simpler. I am now the teacher and the trader. I teach myself how to trade. I been in paper/sim manual trading for 2 years straight and have no regrets. I will stay in paper/sim trading until I am ready to go live. I have two algos that is making money for the year. But my main focus is manual discretionary trading. I have not loss money trading yet. As for me, I believe I am close to live consistently profitable trading. I still have some proving and work to do. My method of trading is starring at the chart and make my best educated guess on price direction for 1 hour per day.