Italics mine . Let's see, were those guys at LTCM, Societe Generale, and Ameranth, and that guy Nieder.. something or other, retail? I forget.
I started actively trading YM on 1/2/08 Starting account balance --- $10,000 Current account balance ---- $12,764 Largest single day losses in the prior 5 weeks -$625 on Fed Day lesson learned: dont trade fed day -$590 holding a position overnight - lesson learned: dont hold YM positions overnight -290 made 32 trades one afternoon lost track of open positions lesson learned: One trade at a time. 3 losers and quit for the day happy to share other rookie lessons learned - let me know
I have realized that the reason no one else can teach you this stuff is - no one else can teach you how to get up the next day after a losing day --- and trade your plan the same way again you can read that in lots of books --- but no one can help you do it
In my own experience - which is all of 1 month actively day trading futures is: you have to stay small enough so that your (or at least my) inevitable mistakes dont kill you I was extremely fortunate the market was chopping yesterday when I lost focus and I only lost 290 bucks had the market moved against me I could have lost thousands
my observation would be: trading is alot like blackjack - with the trader sitting in the dealer seat as long as others keep coming to the table and the dealer is not stupid.... he will win
A teacher can teach a student to apply his intellect so that he may objectively analyse his trading results. This is how attention is diverted from the pain of a losing trade and kept on track in order to improve the execution of the student's plan. A succesful trading method can be shown to work and bad results will have logical causes. Pointing out the improvements a student has to make will be the student's motivation to get out of bed the next morning.
Great thread. My bit: Be in control, you make the decision whether to enter or not. Not trading is a legit option. Wait for momentum to develop then make perhaps just one trade (after waiting for 2 hours this can be dificult). Remember that 1% a week =52 %?/year. Not Bad for a business. FEEL the market. It is telling you things all the time, try and decipher the language and be really conservative. Come away with a small profit each day, especially on a friday.