I often have the same problem although I'm slowly getting better. I'm half way through the book "The Disciplined Trader". The middle section is a bit dry and repetitious but I find the ideas very interesting. I'll probably have to skim through it a second time after I'm done. Anyway if I understand his concepts correctly your/my lack of patience may be a result of fear. In this case fear of giving back profits. For example when a trader is afraid or stressed they are generally in a hurry to eliminate that stress/fear. Time seems to move very slowly even though it's not and you become impatient. As soon as you exit the trade the fear/stress is gone. In contrast when your elated or experiencing something that is gratifying time seems to move more quickly. You wish it could last longer. Until we learn to recognize and control the fear of giving back profits one possible solution may be trading smaller size. In dollar terms you'll have less profit/capital at risk and therefore may feel less fear of losing or giving back profits so it should be easier to let your profitable positions run, like we all know we should.
Just take speculation we call trading as a computer game and you don't even need patience. Especially after you have successfully hacked eternal life.
The conversation, so far, centers on two streams of thought (See attached). The stream (A) that alludes to fear finally and the stream B that points out stock trading is not a fast paced effort, gives you some pragmatic clues about what you may turn to as a solution to your problem. By trading for some time, you get to the place where you have several streams of money running, concurrently. If your stock sellection has any uniformity, then you probably are rotating through a similar series of stocks. I found over time that I had to spread my capital aound more and more so I wound owning, at any time, a greater and greater variety of stocks. Sort of like widening my conveyor belt more and more. So I have several comments that may be helpful. 1. It seems to me that you could more spend time getting stocks ready for the conveyor belt. 2. You could be monitoring these guys to be sure to enter at optimum times. 3. when there is a "ripe" candidate, go to your list of current holds and determine which one is best to exit based upon how much better your new "ripe" candidate is going to make money for you. NB 2 and 3 above, in combination represent what is called a "X over" strategy where you flip from one to another to get the increased money velocity for your capital. 4. By comparing the quality of each of your holds, you are able to always be running a "ranking" of performance. One way I do this is to plot their % increases during the day on a chart that has all of them in different colors. I do the same on another chart for the set I have "ripening". So this combo of suggestions may shed a little light on your situation. Obviously, you are not viewing the situation on the correct chart durations. Several people implied this to you knowingly or unknowingly in stream B. By my suggestion of viewing these winning holds you have concurrently, in a comparitive manner, I deprive you of needing patience and require you to, instead, focus on how "well" each is making money. The two immediately above paragraphs and 4. will cause you to "slow down" your charts to fractals that are comensurate with stock trading for profits. Most stock half cycles of profit making takes several days as you experience may have taught you. Naturally you display individual charts of each (the holds and the "ripes") on one of your screens. what occupies you time, mostly (and continually) is simply taking the pains to do the "x overs" to keep your overall money velocity at a max. As far as stream A is concerned, you can see that looking at your current rules, you find several things lacking. were you to do an A-2 effort, you would find this out. You are not caught in the trap of the B-3 poster or his traders and if you notice the fear mentioned by A-4, it is not for those reasons proffered. It is because you are not on the proper trading fractal (you must shift from where you are to a proper slower one) and you must get to a place to undrstand how to enter and exit to make all the money that is flowing in the universe of stocks you choose to trade. Your fear, as shown by impatience, is mostly related to not having a quality trading approach. The slow grinding pace of trading stocks demands that you be comprehensive and be prepared.
Grob, I am not sure why but none of your attachments open once downloaded. What are you zipping them with?
The trick to reading Grob's attachments: - Use IE or - Save the file, rename it to .doc, then open, or specifically open with wordpad/MS word.
I do not know how it works. I did the following: Copied the thread and printed it. Cut out the pieces on butcher paper to begin a roll (long piece of butcher paper) of posts that will, in time show a progression of thinking by other people. Establish themes Letters (there were 9 to start) Regroup ideas in themes to get A and B. reverse the designations. Draw flow lines and number the pieces. Then I opened a word file and just copied and pasted in word the above results beginning with the thread original post. I posted the word file. It ended in .doc which is accepted by ET. I did not know that no one could use it. I opened it for me to look at, so I made another bad assumption that others could use it as well. There is an error in it where I put B-3 instead o the correct A-3. I figured that most people would fix it because the context did convey that I made a mistake. OT: A substantive note: As in most threads, it is really difficult to get a focus on the opportunity facing the originator and the contributors who either have the same opportunity or have made a few steps further along the way. Some conditions, situations and circumstances brought up directly and/or indirectly are actually not opportunities but instead are really traps. Recently, in a thread that was closed I went through 155 chronological posts of a person who was interested in something that the thread was built around Before I could post a similar sort of thing to this, that characterised his path to his current trap, the moderator found that the thread had gotten out of hand. Too bad for the moderator and his cronies. The two year chronology pointed out several poignant turns and twists that originated from a particular mind set that caused the person to pursue getting to the trap he finally cannot get out of. He took many opportunities and then the trend changed as he went farther afield from the path that leads to success. As usual at some point he became parked and unable to pose "whatever" as considerations for meandering back to the chosen ground for forwarding himself to excellence. I continue to track a bunch of ET types for long periods of time. I occasionally PM one or another should the climate be possible for them to consider something. Usually I am wrong about the possibility, however. The patience (or lack of) is a MAJOR symptom of stuff leading to permenant trading failure. I could see immediately that the thread has great potential (except for the moderator and his cronies issues) to spin out a "tree" to the left and right of potential pathways to success. I decided to not let the original nine independant comments each go their way. The "rules" theme and the "proper fractal" theme emerge, for me, as the only clues to the causal factors for the "patience" symptom so far. the patience symptom has about 6 to 8 other names as well. i expect them to appear and those who know how to, may put in those things that take a person to those places. Imagine what it would be like here if ET had an orientation to several things such as: 1. Periodic summarizations by skilled persons in the field (unlike having a computer science major run a psychology forum). 2. A system of relating topics ( like the 6 to 8 relating to the symptom, patience) within a forum (like psychology in this case). 3. Having a technique and policy for just dumping OT stuff out of threads ( the precursors to getting out of hand type stuff). Oviously, I am laying some ground work here, as usual, regarding QA of this important thread. I know that none of these things can actually be done because they fall under "limitations of people based upon their time constraints" which is not the reason anyway.
OK. I got it. The filename ends with .ZIP for some reason when it should end with .DOC. After downloading it, I manually changed the extension and voila! I will check it out...... still waiting for the list that you mentioned in the other thread. Thanks.
I agree with Grob109 here. This is how it works for me. Whenever I enter a stock, the set up looks exactly the same on all indicators, volume, and price. Once I have a standard starting point and point of reference, then I just follow along my indicators and record what happens during a successful trade. Once you have that blue print, you will have no problem holding because you know whats going on at all times.
This is what I refer to as sequencing. For whatever reason as a person works through learning to be more effective, he gets to see the relationships of the various varibles of the stock market and how they enter into the picture in importance at various times. As a side comment that is how the three variable scoring came to be devised. There are a variety of ways in which a person gets to understand the truths that he discovers. One of them is how relationships, when dicovered, are reinforced by things like orderliness and patterns and sequences. On one side a person is creating what he feels he needs; on the other side the market tells the person whether or not he is correct and also whether or not it is his responsibility to take care of that part of the business. You can see the result of the macro worker bees. For some reason they still fall short of the general market averages which are the defined level of standing still capital valuewise. they have two basic irreversable handicaps: They deal in maths that do not work for making money and they eliminate, almost completely the variables related to human activity. What a silly shame. No one is making money until they are doing better than the market. The market is the neutral value reference. Making money is done on a set of exponentials of the market performance. I call them doublings, that is exponents of the small base two. Probably the Napierian base is more accurate but that is a little complex until a person gets to understanding that the market works on the basis of human behavior instead of arithematic or just periodic functions. Traders, naturally, go through a comparitive set of levels of performance as compared to other traders. There is a complete set of comparative terms floating about like ghosts that describe trading in terms of this kind of human activity or performance or effectiveness. So what is the symptom, patience, connected too? More than rules? more than trading on the appropriate fractal?