If you read Fooled by Randomness (i think that it's in this book) he explains how you should just take one big gamble if the odds are against you: i.e. 0.49 chance of success or lower. But if the odds are in your favor (0.51 or better) then you should play the law of large numbers like the house does in the casino.
spike500 Nice series of posts. They should be very helpful to others. I especially agree with you about knowing how you work. What I mean is knowing your pysiology and pyschology. Were I to prioritize the best path of iterative refinement in this area it would be to use reinforcement of successful behavior and knowing how to terminate and recover immediately from failure when failure occurs. Humans have a greater propensity to protect themselves than they do to hunt and explore. Using this knowledge to rebalance your systems to tend towards hunting is very important. You can see that so many people in ET are definitely stuck. They never hunt at all, mostly out of fear I would guess. My partner has a colleague who writes on stuff other than markets (clinical hypnotherapy). His book The Wizard Within has some ancillary stuff that will appeal to you. In chapter 5 thee is a good starting point, particularly the test beginning on page 50 and the followon set of statements beginning on page 64. this area deals in learning from experience which you are doing very well at. Another person with whom I am coauthoring with, time permitting, has had several of her works translated into English recently. They have not gone to press yet and are still in review. get her publication "the Self healing Human" there are about 50 copies in the US now. There are many typos and awkward expressions so if you use it send markups to me so I can forward them. This is new stuff to the world. She is an immunologist and her focus is fixing busted minds and brains. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 will change your trading for life. The Wiz book is conventional knowledge (hemisphere stuff) the healing book is where you see the possibility of trading with sports memory on automatic (you have to dig here a little; the deep rough out on it is in the works). The beauty of this type adventure is that you use yourself as the thinking model and you come to understand how you yourself work. The most amazing part is that your trading and associated emotions change totally. this opens a whole new universe for you to cruise around but it is not easy to go back to where you were before. Who cares. what a lot of this comes down to is building a computer and software to trade. the location of the computer is in you and you build the software rapidly and totally in the computer. If you know of the MIT operation that is being done to fix things using local people and local solutions in deprived areas; this is much the same on a personal basis instead of external and community based. Finally, ifyou are reading BW 03MAR05 on page124 there is a comment on "unearthing the unarticulated needs" instead of doing stuff the old way. You can read the 04APR05 issue, particularly the top 50 profiles and see this happening. Trading will be going through the same thing soon. Once a few people start letting the cat out of the bag, almost anyone will be able to pick up on it and run with it. It is kinda a nano technology of the trading individual. This should really open some doors for you.
Nice post. I share the same perspective on the psychology of markets but funny thing is I don't use a system at all and couldn't daytrade the stock indices for the life of me. Same path, different roads.
In the Risk of Ruin (aka How long will it take to turn a $5k account into $0) part of the article I stated (with support from Perry Kaufman's work) that the highest risk of ruin was at the beginning. i.e. when the account was smallest. There is another possible reason why the Risk of Ruin may be biggest at the beginning but it won't apply to all traders here on Elite Trader. That reason is the lack of experience that a beginning/new trader has. This lack of experience will obviously increase the probability of making mistakes (in any area of trading) which will have negative financial consequences. So a new trader starting a new account at say $5k has a higher risk of ruin than an experienced trader using the same sized account and same strategy. I would say that this is analogous to any profession. An experienced bricklayer has a greater chance of laying a straight wall than an inexperienced bricklayer.
this is true, if your plan is to either make your goal (100k) or go bust (0) and not stop in the middle, you're better off taking a risk that'll pay off the first time (ie a 20-1 payoff/~odds with your entire 5k at risk) instead of either 1. taking smaller risks that have less payoff or (ie your 5k at risk but only a 2-1 payoff/~odds) or 2. not betting your whole bank role each time(ie 20-1 payoff/~odds but only a portion of bankroll at risk); since the more times you play (with the odds against you), the more likely you are to end up at bust (since the house edge will grind you down). And opposite is true if you have the edge (ie you're essentially now the house)...Too lazy to write the probability/expectancy calcs right now...