YVW. I'm sorry to have interferred a little in your thread. Today and the last two days are market turning points that are significant. Today is devoted to the details of how a long channel cannot start or restart at the beginning of the full force of a depression. The three subs so far this am (short, long and short) took out the prior end of the short channel. The short channel now has a new FTT and it isn't over yet. As most know, I have trader zones programmed. When I exhaust his palaver with facts, he turns to doing quint pics of me. That set up the series he will then do. I post calls (usually 4 only but this time I did 20 to spoof him (others are spoofing him too)). Then the calls happpen (this time I called the end of the channel within a few minutes (it was "settlement" so it was easy)). this leads to my implying I am leaving and I thank others for sharing the fun. Traderzones keeps track of how many times I have left and come back. He points this out because he is programmed to to it. So I appreciate that you understood my comments. They are from real experience and you can google a 100,000 share trade thread on the web in a couple of places. I called one on Raging Bull beginning a day ahead (my usual custom) and I called a biotech also in the 28 dollar range where I made a 17 point net on 100,000 shares one day. So now Traderzones has been spoofed once again and he has to increase his numbers on how many times I have spoofed him into believing I have left ET. There are many warnings for noobies to consider. They go like this: 1. Trading is easy to do and very profitable. 2. A potential trader has to follow a dichotomous key to learn to trade. That is there are many forks in the road to successful trading. A noobie must fund these forks in the road and make the right choice. 3. Everyone must own their choices. 4. Learning is the key to becoming a successful trader. So the first fork is to learn how to learn. If a person makes the choice to not learn how to learn, then he will not become successful. The long way is 10,000 hours of trial and error. 5. the subject of learning to trade is the market. Learning to make money is the wrong fork. the consequence of choosing to learn to make money instead of learning how markets work is emotional fear, anxiety and anger. Learning the markets imparts comfort, support and confidence. 6. the supreme learning experience is teaching another person to trade as an expert. 7. Make the choice to use learning to differentiate your mind just as you have done to learn to do reading and writing and math. It is the same as learning a new language or learning to play or sing music. 8. Acknowledge that the markets have only so much detail. They are granular and this is evidenced by many many facts about markets. If a person can start with the idea that markets have only finite parts to all parts of the market, then you are ready to look at a piano scale or a sheet of music. Get a sitar if you want more notes on the chromatic scale. 9. Decide to use market orders only. Timing markets is how money is made. 10. Decide to partner with the market and write a partnership contract. Each partner has his job and responsibilities. No usurping. 11. Decide that the market is always right. "Tells" come to you. You accept them. TRUST comes into the partnership by doing scycles of tells>> acceptance>>> allowing trust. 12. Decide to learn from the market which is always right and which deserves your TRUST. 13. Learn that all trading takes place in the Present. 14. Learn that the granularity of the market dictates the math of the market. 15. The market "tells" you several kinds of information. Three kinds and they all relate to time passing: Sentiment, Volume and Price. 16. The variables are measured as binary qualities. choose to work qualitatively in trading. Do not choose any quantitative measures for trading. Stop and consider who you are where you came from and the environment you live in. All of these things are a consequence of your choices. Own up to your status and its handicaps. Notice that you memory is empty regarding trading skills knowledge and purposeful experience. None of this is going to go away or be forgotten. Every noobie starting out is the sum and product of past choices. Most people when in the market experience fear, anxiety and anger. Read the posts of 12 people in ET from post 1 to the final post. Examine how learning failure works particularly. Now we start over. 1. The trader's orientation to the market is a left/right orientation. Make the choice to look at the market in this manner from now on. Notice the future comes into the Present from the right. The past fills up the left. Price is always to the left of the quality for the sentiment of the market. Look at your chart and see if the right one third of it is blank and is for dealing with the future. your plaform may not be able to allow you to put the Present where you wish on your chart. Draw a right trend line that is long and extend it into the future. Learn that price is always to the left of a trendline that states the sentiment of the market. Take Support and Resistance and the pivot point and discard it be building something to block it from being a first recourse in your mind. This stuff is vertically oriented and NOT market sentiment oriented. 2. Always use 1. to know the sentiment of the market. Trendlines are always present on each fractal of observation. The first thing to learn is how the price and volume of the market are contained. 3. Learn by doing drills. You have to make the choice to differentiate your mind by learning purposefully. This is done the same way you learned each differentiated system you now have differentiated in your mind. At this point we discover why spending 10,000 hours over years is silly and purposeless. The alternative is drills. You have to know three different "tells" from the market: sentiment, volume and price. Knowing comes from the memory and it is named inference. 4. Learn how the mind works. An easy way is to spend 15 dollars and buy a DVD. For another 15 bucks you can buy another DVD and find out how Traderzones screwed himself over by his choices. Get the DVD's. So now you have a lesson plan for becoming an expert. You know to work qualitatively with three variables in time to time the market. You know learning takes place by doing drills. You also know keenly how your mind works to become differentiated. I have the list of drills. I am making a parallel video to the ones I mentioned above for trading. Make you own list of drills and make your own video of how you are using your brain to get it differentiated doing drills. you will need these to teach others (this is the time when you really get skilled).
continued..... So lets start over. 1. you are skilled at annotating all market variables. 2. you recognize all market activity and have a name for each item. 3. you log using your market vocabulary and language. and you trade accordingly by extrqcting the market's continuing offer. 4. you debrief at the end of each day (one page) and plan all the trades for the next day (one page). So this was done as an example of how to do what is above. It was just 20 trades during 81 bars. By reading the above and looking between the lines, one thing is discovered. All the vocabulary and drills let to a single pattern which forms the building blocks of the system of interconnected and reinforced fractals for sentiment, volume and price. To make that first trendline you used two bars on a chart. you found out that there were only so many relationships of two bars (granularity). Two classes of pairs of bars emerged: translation and internals. Volume related to the trends you drew on any fractal. The P, V relationship emerged as a hypothesis set. This brought the single pattern of the markets into view. A lego approach emerged. By using the patterns you could build fractals upon one another. This meant that one Principle came into being. you always kenw the anser to three questions: 1. where is the market in the cycle (pattern)? 2. what is next? 3. how fast is it changing? I gave this gift to an author who termed it gibberish. The author wrote a book named "Trendfollowing". He spent 8 hazardous years writing the book. B2B 2R 2B is the pattern in shorthand. It is the "long" pattern. Say aloud the pattern as you look at a chart. you will see that you find the pattern over and over. you will also see the R2R 2B 2R pattern in between the B2B 2R 2B. To say the pattern use Black for B and red for R. notice how the patterns overlap and how three patterns form the boundaries fo the next slower fractal. All patterns begin and end with an FTT. B2B is a move from right to left and 2R is a move from left to right. the last 2B is right to left to get to the FTT. This is two dominant moves with a non dominant move in between. If you read 50 charets from your past log records, you will be differentiated to see all patterns for the rest of your life. On my platform I have some aids. All internal cases appear in yellow boxes of two bars. Nicely, all new bars are in a yellow box of one sort or another. then the new bar graduates into a translating case if it has enough umph. Yesterday, bar 48 went throgh all internals before becoming and OB and after it eneded the short channel at the approximate time I called for the end. Here is how it is for humans. Learning and becoming expert has been demo'd over and over on ET. There are all kinds of records of people going through this and becoming expert. What handicaps a person from following a straight and narrow path to expertise? Personal decisions are the source of all handicaps. If you have taught swimming, skiing or the Class B requirements for midshipman, you know that fear is in the picture because learners put it there usually. What is it like when a learner does not make this choice? Learners acquire skills at a rather fast pace. I had the experience in learning to trade stocks. Fear was not part of the picture since we only traded quality stocks. There is one noobie warning that I can think of. Most people have learned considerable baggage along the way. It is possible that a person cannot differentiate his mind regarding trading. Read rcanfiel then traderzones from beginning to end* There are several others I kept track of and they usually followed the same path. Making the choice to focus on "making money" instead of making the choice to "learn how markets work", leads either to failure or the 10,000 hour theory. What compounds difficulties for learning is often losing money when not expecting to. In a lot of learning efforts people are also taught to be correct in what they do. It is often called "discipline" by mistake. These two traps preclude learning to trade. *here you see the two causes of failure that are most easily apparent: being smarter than the market and "inventing". There is no way to correct "being smarter than the market" by putting in a new first recourse. A person who is "smarter" will always revert to the "first recourse" he built when he built it to accomplish something in the past (probably a cover for a job related impossible task. For TZ it was evaluating the integrity of other people, especially streetsmart people). TZ is big league in inventing; there will always be one in the pipeline for him and it will be "priced" by his reality at the time. He continally phishes for things he can invent and when he loses his bait; he hits to complain button with Joe. The sentiment is long or short and usually color coded if you repair your platform to make color reflect sentiment. Price moves to the left when it is following the market sentiment; this is called being on the "right" side of the market. By trading point to point on patterns, you do trade the non dominant moves but they are measured on a faster opposite oriented fractal). The volume measure is "increasing" and "decreasing": increasing is continuation of trend and decreasing is where the "change" window is open for reversal trades to resume being on the right side of the market. So how long does it take to become an expert? the answer lies in figuring out how long it takes to replace the existing "first recourses" you have when you make the decision to begin. The mind is very plastic and it is always putting neurons where needed. Interconnecting is always happening as well. Assuming a person does decide to learn how the market works, then he can drill his way to expert quite rapidly. Annotating thoroughly is an easy drill to accomplish. Drawing straight lines and cloning them is quick and using old charts on a screen is a quick way to build the annotating skill. If patterns are known then, using themn to build slower fractals is easy. Annotating the point is done with a gimmick where you just click the 1, 2, and 3 into position since they are prepackaged to click click click. PRV shows on volume and so you know ahead of the bar ending the volume result. The timing for getting in the groove has been worked out and in a full immersion setting it goes quite fast. Adding contracts from profits is a good measure of the learning pace. Doing a days chart with a log synopsis takes about 40 minutes. Several days of drilling down on charts @ 40 minutes per chart completes the differentiation process. It takes about a month of real time days to have the experience of most episodes that occur on a BBT or TAPE level. To log a whole channel on a BBT level is about 135 lines of logging. This is the "master" for operating and it can have internal loops (which extend the channel) but they are handled by just using horizontal lines at crtical places (today it was the gapped value of the channel FTT from yesterday). I feel having two continuing answer sheets is the best approach. I posted one of them yesterday on the chart for the first four trades.
What has this got to do with thinking in percentages? Why hijack this thread? It started off nicely with some intelligent comments and then you come along and post a bloody essay with crappy little handwritten notes. Mate, stick to the point
Jack just does not get that this site is not about him and his demented newbie-killing novella-length fantasy rambles. But good post... You listening, Jack?
If you are an emotional trader, you will lose your shirt. If you are an emotional futures trader, you will lose your shirt and your pants. If either are the case, get on a simulator or drop your trading size to ONE. Dollars can spook anyone, even traders with $3M in their trading account. You have to refrain from looking at dollars while trading, or you will become emotional, and therefore irrational, which is not sustainable practice to trade profitably. I look at contract numbers only, doing my margin calculations well before I trade. Like a man who likes to watch the girls walk by in skirts and tight jeans, he knows they are distracting, but he would not sit in front of a Main Street window with such for a view, when he is trying to think about numbers. Likewise with trading. Turn off everything but your system and WHAT YOU SEE. The numbers must become just a tool to feed your system, and nothing more. Wait for your setups and sieze them precisely. I repeat, if you have yet to conquer emotions in trading, get out of trading size. Trade small, until emotions are controlled, and then increase size by ONE. Rinse and repeat. And watch the girls after the money is in your pocket. The bulge in your pants will be more impressive to the girls.