It does look to me like Jack's methods are worthless, but his detractors are FAR more destructive to threads here than Jack is. Why do you people feel the need to quote and repost large posts bashing Jack? What do you think you are accomplishing? If you lost money trading Jack's crap... guess who's fault it is? It is YOUR fault. Everything that happens to you in trading is YOUR responsibility and YOUR fault. If you don't grasp that, you will never make money. Just some holiday thoughts.
I'm one of the newbs with the $5K account and it is easy to see how I could have already blown out my account (but have not) #1 Low capital. I really need about $7500, I don't so I just stick with /6B, /ZN, /QM, /YG. I trade to have like $80.00 winners and $25.00 losers. If I mess with /ES and /CL ... my loser will be >2%of my account and that is bad news. There's a bias, even in guys with $5K, in that they think in terms of being up thousands when they should be focused on being "up" hundreds and feeling great about it. #2 Psychology. This comes under many banners but one needs to psychologically prepared for losing 50% of the time. I know I am not ready yet but I am working on this. One needs to trade so small that a loser is almost nothing to you. ($35-$70 for the $5K guy). #3 Discipline. Trading your strategy, only trading your strategy and even as a FUTURES trader, sitting on hands some days. I'm pretty good at this. There are many, many great strategies, any idiot can backtest a few weeks of data and find one. Even a modest strategy when discipline is applied to it can yield profits. #4 Focused effort: Just trading during times of high volatility. Focusing efforts on the right market at the right time. I'm good at this. Fixing mistakes, not repeating them, acknowledging your winners and seeking to repeat them. So I have 2 of the 4 down ... which explains my results (slightly down including commissions)... When I get 4 of 4 I know it is fair to expect that my $5K account could be $6 or $7 within a year .... if I keep that money in there .. and just let 'her grown and only add 1 more contract per $5000 or so .. the sky is the limit. There is no escaping the 4 items and there could certainly be more. Only 10% of all people have the discipline to do this. Fear and Greed are too powerful for most people.
Jack, where are YOU mentally given these quotes of yours? For a while I participated with a multidisciplinary team at a learning hospital at the invitation of my psychiatrist who is also a Native American shaman. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1555191&#post1555191 Even Jiminy Cricket has his old fashioned neck tie off or loose. this is a real treat for the mind. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2106468&#post2106468 This is THE place in THE world to be when I post. If you are so stupid to not have 3m micorpore tape to tape your mouth shut, then use the stupid person's painful type tape. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2111426#post2111426 what distinguishes me from Forbes 400 people is that they are greedy and selfish and I am not http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2610703#post2610703
There was a good article a few years ago about accuont size and success. Basically, your odds went up drastically as you went from $10K to $20K, up to $50K, up to $100K trading with $5K or $7.5K, each is just as unlikely to allow someone to succeed. Undercapitalization is one of about 3-4 reasons why businesses fail (along with lack of knowledge about the market served and poor management skills and poor location) Imagine starting a store. All things being equal, who will succeed, someone with $7500 or someone with $100,000?
Hershey haters: congrats. You killed another thread. Unsubscribing from this one. WTF are you people doing?
We're not haters, we're exposers. So now you can get back to your "BoWo" bashing, hypocrite... WTF is that obsession about? At least we have a legitimate purpose. Good riddance.
Orientation refers to the trader. Think magazine carried and article in the late 50's on the orientation of a person. The article looked at vertical and horizontal as the pssibilities It also drew conclusions about human behavior as a consequnce of orientation. I rcommend NOT using OODA as a routine for many reasons. OODA has a vertical oroeintation it turns out. MADA a different type routine and not based on gambling but based upon the onprobablitisitc part of information theory, is a horizontal oriented wasy of thinking for himans. Most charts are oriented to two axes and the aves and variables are usually arranged as in Algebra base 19. Your comment is related to a display and not a human. I am speaking in this thread about some of the causes of failure. One cause of failure is a person's personal orientation when it comes to reading a chart. I contrast traderzone's way of reading a chart to a MADA trader's way of reading a chart. Traderzones went to great length to disparage the three moves of a trend in a horizontal orientation a while back. He did it be exprlaining his vertical orientation. A vertical orientation tends to see things in an up and down maner. Up and down are opposites and these opposites are ofeten considered to be the only possibilities. Why would horizontal be any different? This question is not something a verticaly oriented person would be able to consiider. I posted the parts of a trend to make it clearer how a vertically oriented person gets trapped in trading. I also commented on how the 10,000 myth gets believed by those who cannot trade very well. Recently, there was an article in the NY Times. The Editor of the Business Section allowed it to be published in the Sunday edition. The writer siad a lot of things about particular people and some traders. The article was hilarious. Neither the writer nor the editor knew enough about trading to be able to come up with anything sensible to say about trading. Can you imagine either of them dealing with the personal orientation of a person watching the markets? That is not going to happen. My post on personal orientation is not going to be understood either. Fro me to say having a horizontal orientation is going to be passed by by most readers. Few readers are going to get anything about the advantages of having a horizontal orientation. The Tucson locals met yesterday to get ready for the next week's trading. All but one had red the article (we get the NY Times in Tucson). we noted that the writer did not determine correctly how well the subject trader actually did the day of the interview. All of this points out how difficult it is for anyone to communicate with anyone else. Our locals are doing 50% a quarter on under 30 trades (They began in January). This is different than the NY Times article portrays. We consider the cost of trading as trivial compared to the net. In trading the Left and Right Trend Lines are very important. If a person is vertically oriented he may not be able to SEE the markets in terms of trends. Often the vertically oriented elements like R and S and the Pivot Point are used by vertically oriented people. Th very significant thing that separates perople that continually take the market's offer is TIMING. The MOST CRUCIAL SINGLE DETERMINANT FOR SUCCESS IS KNOWING THE PERIOD OF OVERLAP BETWEEN TWO TRENDS. This is more easily determined by a person using a horizontal orientation. It is NOT the orientation of the chart and it IS the orientation of the person. the vertically oriented person often does entry exit trading. The horizontally oriented person often does reversal hold trading, instead. What is the different in the quality of a trader who does reversals compared to a trader who does exits? Where do targets and stops come from? vertical or horizontal orientations? Trends make three horizontal moves; this is incompatible with targets and stops which are vertical measures. How is the beginning dominant move measured beginning to end? How is the next move measured beginning to end? How is the last move measured beginning to end? None are measured by price but price points are a consequence of taking the measures. Most traders fail and that will always be the case. Last Sunday we saw and editor fail and a writer fail as well. What is with the NY times and the Journal of Finance? Whatgives with QA at these places?