Wow.. ok.. so its all well thought out. I definitely get scared when price moves against me by even a tick, and as an amateur, I expect that right after I put my trade on I am in the green! Clearly this is false thinking, but it sure would be nice!
It is thought out in the abstract - but not always easy to execute when in the moment. There is a sort of virtuous loop to all this. The more confident one becomes about one's judgment of PA, the less fearful he is when price moves adversely, the more he allows the potential of the trade to manifest, the better his results. The key of course is right participation - otherwise acquiring the habit of giving room to a trade can quickly devolve to hope. I am not there yet, but I see objective progress and it keeps me motivated. You were right earlier about 'big' runs showing very little initial adverse movement. That does lead one to 'crave' immediate momentum. I have gone through that phase, though a little less now.
Real time is different, and actually money is yet another level. I've tried a few times, its crazy. I do it to train myself, to see how I will react, and to get comfortable with it. Have you tried live trading yet?
No doubt real money is different, although I have never daytraded it. However, consistent posting of one's sim trades does bring an element of 'pressure' to the equation - not nearly as much as when trading real money, but a whole lot more than if one were sim trading privately. It helps to balance things out just a little. I will not trade live unless I can make consistent returns on sim. Capital is too precious.
I'm in the same boat Game, it seems like I make great strides and then the last 2 Wednesdays have been really tough, still trading today so we will see how it turns out but I am still not ready to trade real money.
Yes, the journal for sure adds an element of accountability, and why its good that Db insists on it. I did the SLA method strictly for two week in my journal and showed by the end of the week, I was ahead by many points. But I go frozen a bit when I am actually going to use real money, I talk myself out of every trade, as if I need more info to put it on. Having just finished reading Nature of Risk, this is addressed directly. More information leads to more price risk. So for me at least, I can see that using real money isn't as free as trading sim, and since I want to treat trading like a business and make it work, I'm pushing myself to get over it. Precious capital is an issue, but at the same time, when you know this is the case, you can't think clearly and no matter how much you trust yourself from sim, the trading live will be different. Anyway, what the heck do I know, and this is at least only what my problems seem to be.
Not much wiser though. I keep playing for dimes. The larger context put the overall LOLR down and look where we are now.
A large part of it is because he's reached the point where he's trading price and not lines. But it's taken him 12 days short of a year to get here. I was saying in chat this morning that it's easy to look back at 1000 and think oh yeah all I had to do was go short there and sit on my hands. And that may or may not be true. But if doing so was not part of your plan, and you try to do so the next time what looks like the same setup occurs again, you're begging to have your short hairs ripped out. This is not to say that one can't modify his plan to incorporate this sort of thing, but every time one modifies his plan, he has to go back to the backtesting stage and begin again, at least with regard to the modification. The news here is the air pocket all the way down to 3600. That was/is worth waiting for. Edit: Incidentally, my first sentence is not intended to make anybody feel bad. But Game has been at this every frigging day for a year. A year. And he's struggled. And he had/has baggage. This is not an easy fix. It still takes time and effort. But Game is getting there, and if there were any sort of prize for journals, he'd win it hands down.