Successful trading without luck is impossible. But luck helps only those who believe in it. Or believe in themselves, which basically means the same: believing in one's luck. After all, no matter how good your strategy turned out to be in backtesting, there is no guarantee that it will work now when you need it most. So you take chances. If you succced it is not only because your strategy is so good, but also because you were lucky. It is hard to separate one from the other. One of my systems this month has had 10 winners out of 11 trades. Is it because it is so good or is it because I am lucky? I don't know, but I do know that those who think that they need a perfect strategy (I mean one that would be luck-independent, whatever that means) will most likely never succeed as traders. Trading is about luck as much as anything else in life.
Wally, I agree with you. Every trade has a 50/50 chance of going in either direction. You only skew probability in your favor by following trends and setting tight stops to keep your losses small. Reminds me of a Clint Eastwood movie when he says to the bad guy "do you feel lucky?"
It's good to have some idea when chopinness begins to interfere with your strategy. For my systems this is irrelevant, however I am getting concerned about narrowing ranges and so I recently decided to lower my targets, so far only in one of my systems. BTW, thanks to everyone who inquired about my systems. I will reply in some time. Too busy with other things right now.
a 50/50 direction yes , but 50/50 hitting our target no. Over the longterm luck has nothing to do with it.......
wally - that is a thought provoking statement. So does luck go to the prepared, to the positive thinkers, to the people in tune with (fill in the blank), or is it distributed randomly? Does God have anything to do with luck distribution? Does luck distribution follow a bell curve. Perhaps we are trying to develop systems to trade luck and not the markets. By cutting our losses we are giving luck a chance to carry us out to the other fat tail area of the bell curve.
In a nutshell, you should not trade when THEY likely make you to lose. This is a general principle, They will take advantage of you at the following moments. - when you just get up - when you just come back from outside - when you need to go to bathroom - when you feel tired - when you feel nothing is going on for you - whenever a little voice in your heart saying to you not to trade