What's your plan for overcoming your fear of losing money? Don't say making money. I only ask b/c the last time I commented on your blog you mentioned this. There's no secret to it, you just have to take the trade and accept the inherent uncertainty. No other way.
OP, Fwiw Reading though this journal â is different.., and a shame... So letâs take stock this morning; Today; I will stick my ego up my ass I will sick my opinion up my ass I will trade exactly what I see I will use disciplineâ¦, and be 100% control of my actions I will have losing trades Oh and I should add, I am going to make money What in the hell is your plan Food for thought â if your ego allows And if not â I Sincerely Thank You It is your choice RN
my plan is to keep reading books about traders psychology to figure out my issues and to keep posting here so I can learn. To better define my set ups and narrow them down to just a few best ones. It's not an easy journey and you don't become a great trader overnight. If it were so easy, everybody will be a billionaire. long 2@38, stop @37 , target YH and R1, stopped out.
You have "vaguely" described your trade method...that's OK if you're doing such to protect the content of your methods. However, if you have not described your trade method because you're "still designing" the method...you should not be trading with real money on the line. Simply, the designing process is reserved only for backtesting and simulator trading. Thus, do not make the classic newbie mistake of using real money trading as a way to determine what trade setups you should be using or as a way to "define" your trade method because that stuff should ONLY be done in backtesting with simulator training. In fact, it's not uncommon to see traders with discipline problems with real money trading because their changing rules, tweaking that, inputing a new variable and so on until it blows up in their face. Further, you can easily narrow down your strategies to a few best one in a weekend of backtesting and such should never be done via losing thousands of dollars in real money trading. In addition, now that you've indirectly disclosed you're using several different methods and trying to determine which one is the best ones you should be using... *** Have you backtested each method? *** These methods designed for different types of market conditions? (e.g. one particular method gives you more trade signals when volatility is low or declining in comparison to when volatility is rising or high...vice versa) *** Can you briefly describe key concepts of your best method without going into any in-depth details? Last of all, you specifically stated in your first message in this thread that you want to only take selective high probability trades. That implies you must have done some sort'uv backtesting. Mark
Ok, here is one set up - bounce of Yesterday Close will lead to a new high for the day and then test of R1. So I was long this morning multiple times for this, but exited because I saw price \"stalling\". And on most days my targets are reached quickly, but there are days when it\'s just slowly drifting up and then I think that I see a reversal, because what I think is influencing what I see, and so I exit the trade. Meanwhile we have a series of HL and I should have been still long until we touched R1 now. But when I\'m in a real trade, not simulator, I see things differently then when I\'m not. So when I say better define the conditions, I mean to better define/state my entry/exit conditions to myself at the time of a trade. In stead of trying to be clever and improve my odd and anticipate reversal and hence see it at every tick, I should have just put on a trade, stop and target and walked away. But what is happening, I think, is a negative feedback loop, I don\'t want to lose money, so I don\'t properly play my set ups (either close the trade before I reach the target, or stop loss to tight or moved to quickly), so I start doubting them, and that leads to even worse performance.