The entry is among the least important pieces of a trade plan. Stopping trading real money was a good first step, but you've still got a ways to go.
You trade well on paper. You don't trade nearly as well on cash. If you believe that "its not emotional" and "you feel the same way" then a more touchy feeling person than me would say "you're not in touch with your feelings." I'd say that your brain is very complex and you are not aware of whats taking place below current conscious awareness while you trade. Buddha created a "religion" to expose your conditioning. Guy Claxton wrote a book "The Wayward Mind" based on the latest research. But, if you trade better on paper then with cash, trust me, something is happening in your mind. It was in mine. It took a lot of work to understand that element of myself (better anyway). The beliefs posts are good - IMHO this is one of the main reasons why trading in the real probabilistic world is so hard. PS. Great reference Lamont_C. Db is one of those guys who said he never had conflicts but he also claims its because he did so much pre-work that he was completely confident about what he was doing when he traded. Most of us, like Cashmoney, do damage to ourselves as part of our learning process or have conflicts from earlier in our lives.
from slowbear?...about repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome?. The only mistakes that I know for a fact that I'm making are trading off fear and trading on impulse. Fear based trading is not that big a deal I think as long as you employ good money management techniques, which I am. Impulse trading is my biggest problem. Patience has been a problem for me just about all my life, and thats where the trading on impulse comes from. I'd probably make a good scalper....then again probably not .
You've got indicatoritis and the disease, untreated, is debilitating... Get rid of the intraday charts and the weeklies and just keep the dailies... Drop all but one of the moving averages... Now that's better, isn't it?
... perhaps she can help. Interview with Leaira http://www.3stocksonfire.com/interviews/04_interview_with_Leaira.php
I just read this entire thread. It was awesome. I'm in the same place cm69 was when he made this thread, except instead of normal indicators that appear under the chart, I seem to have a fetish for the different MAs and their slopes. I'm obsessed with setting the colors of my candlesticks to be based on the slope of one or more MAs or a custom programmed derivative that is a function of many slopes combined. Why am I obsessed with that? Because I can input code to do whatever I want and then I can look at any historical data I want and see, based on the colors of the candles, exactly where I would have entered and exited. I can zoom out on my chart. Is the majority of the upward movement green? Is the majority of the downward movement red? I can zoom in and see every entry down to the tick. I can backtest relatively easily and forward test super easily. Every "system" I've come up with based on this is completely mechanical. There's no question on whether to enter or not. Sometimes there's an element I can't program such as "is the last low higher than the low before that?" but that's easy enough to look at and see. Anyway, even tho some of those have forward tested with positive expectancy, I'm still not confident enough to use real money on them. So now I'm playing with countertrend stuff. MACD crossed upward over the 0 line? Go short. There's always a down candlestick when that happens before the rally resumes (if it resumes at all). I love how everyone is all "price action!!! you don't need indicators!" Yet it's never defined. What is price action? Memorizing patterns? Memorizing candlestick formations? Memorizing chart shape + volume? Reading the DOM (which I've stared at for hours a day while watching the charts and I don't see any patterns or useful information in it at all. Numbers just change a lot. Big numbers come and go. What?). Anyway just bumping this 2 year old thread cuz it was helpful to me.
Often when I look at the posts of wayward traders or wayward would-be-traders venting their frustration against their (hopeless) struggles, I pass on by. When so much is amiss a re-direction into market understanding and a successful methodology is not going to happen. However I note your search for a system giving you entry signals. Firstly, lets move to a focus of clarity. The money is in the gyrations, that is the intraday sequential upswings and downswings following each other (eg ES, YM, CL). Secondly you are concentrating on MA cross-overs apparently as your signalling system. By themselves MA cross-overs have their limitations. You can base a successful methodology on a smart use of indicators and clever chart configurations. This could more reasonably take you towards a solution.