you guys had been productive today.. just returned to HK after a break to refresh the mind.. let's see how it goes tomorrow
good luck trading next week will, don't know how you do it though, been backtesting things all weekend, slicing and dicing the index in all kinds of ways and with all kind of indicators, kind say I see much consistancy and good ideas to trade this from. Had a great day trading NQ on friday, but that was more like kind of gut feel and just waiting for the right moment to take a scalp than much technical analysis. So this might have more like been due to luck, so I'm going to probably stop trading that too as I don't want to depend too much on luck in this endavour. FX definitely is much easier.
hi CV, I guess everything happen for a reason and I am sure CF takes a lot of trade due to gut feeling (accompany by PA and TLs ) maybe in someway we need to learn to trust ourselves more and make the best of out whatever it is on hand.. sorry to say i got lost and even more lost on the higher TFs for the last two weeks, this is a killer; lost my balls, so took a walk since Wed afternoon, still watched the market but didn't trade, and done a 400km trip on since Sat (thank you bullet trains ) and all recharge for the market tomorrow. I see CF start to use a term "sport" about trading, and somehow I felt that, much like golf or whatever, I want to play this, and I want to play this better.
I kind a like to comparison to sports, and I also believe in gut feel. Problem is I know where this can leed to if you depend too much on gut feel, there better be a substantial base of reasoning behind your trades or you are asking for trouble. I know a friend who made (when he was a floor trader) and lost (when he went electronic) 25 million euro on gut feel. That left a big impression on me, because I knew him as a floor trader and he was about the best I have ever seen in action. I myself have gone through phases when I made an incredible kind of money for months on end in the nighnties only to give that back in a month of horrible trading when my gut feel left me. The main problem I find with SIF's is that they are much more noisy, making it much harder to put stoplosses in 'the right' places, leading to lack of discipline giving the trade just some more room, and ultimately taking very big disaster losses from time to time. It's the clearer way fx shows you where you are wrong and where to cut losers that makes it easier to trader IMHO. Knowing myself I will no doubt keep following the Hang Seng and NQ, but will very much try (taking a big effort) to refrain from trading untill I feel I get a better hang of one of them making it a rational thing to trade them in a prudent way. The way things are standing now it feels more like gambling.
I don't mean the gut feel when speak about trading as a sport... Knowing indicator and price action well is not a gut feel. It's simply professionalism as a result of deliberate practicing.... It's simply when you play some sport well, you already know every trick of it and learn more and more every day. And you train enough until your response is purely automatic and doesn't require second guessing and thinking about the situation... So when you know your indicator or market price action well and treat is as a sport you just train yourself to differentiate good from bad setup and it's not purely gut feeling nor it is a purely mechanical approach. There are rules to follow but at the same time you also are able to filter the good sample of these rules appearance from bad sample... Don't know if I expressed it all clearly, but I have tried to...
CV, Agree on the SIFs issues about noise. Sense of direction is one thing, desent entries (small size stops) is the major issue. Trading is much like golf, the coordination with various factors, a good trading to me it's like taking swings all night without efforts in the practice range. Day in day out, smooth, effortless, high sucess rate. I done that in the golf practice range; now, I need to do that in da H-SSS-IIIIII
After I tried to explain this "sport" thing it seems I have come to conclusion to what exactly I wanted to say: 1) You have a set of strict rules which are a guarantee of the situation cvds described to NOT happen, cause you in ALL cases will know where to limit the risk and what should and shouldn't happen in order for you to enter and exit. 2). You develop the feel (it prolly is a gut feeling ) in order to FILTER these occurences of the rules based setups. This results in a disciplined approach which will never lead you to giving back any significant profits, not even speaking of many months profits, but at the same time you REDUCE the number of your actual trades compared to mechanically following your rules and you reduce the number of trades to only the best thanks to this gut feeling developed... End result of it is taking the highest quality trades only and of course pretty nice results as a consequence.
Guys I got a chance to look in and want to point something out:- When you learn to drive there are definite rules that you have to learn. In the beginning you are occupied thinking of the rules as you drive, but then after a while you stop concentrating on the rules of driving and start to take in the scenery. It just happens like that. Next your driving skills become much better and again without thinking you develop reflexes that are faster than thinking. Also you become one with the machine - you become aware of it's dimensions, of other drivers, of road dangers and you pick up when there are noises that tell you something is mechanically wrong... you have a feel for the whole driving experience without any awareness of how it all came together. The book "Blink" gives the an excellent explanation for how we make a judgement that is faster that the analytical process. This is something that develops naturally from starting out with definite rules and just given lots of practice and time evolves into to new skill levels. Blink talks about the "gut" feeling and how advanced it can become. So if you are wondering how it happens in trading, it is just the same as acquiring any other skill. Learn the rules and practice until it becomes 2nd nature. I recommend you don't try to learn 2 or 3 markets at once because there are structural differences between markets and it will mix you up - actually lenghthen your learning curve. Screen time on one market develops skill... and it takes a lot of screen time. Your brain has an almost magical process if you feed it the right information, but if you give it mixed information it can draw the daftest conclusions. On a different note, I was expecting roughly 600 points up before we got a big reversal back down again to the lows (i.e. there would be lots of no-brainer long trades). Now I'm thinking there's enough technical energy to bust the 600 points up by quite a way and Banjo's fundamentals would support that. That's not straight up but jiggy like any TF so there will be multi-day retracements, but the longer trend looks like that last bottom could be significant for several weeks. Nice one Banjo.