padutrader, Assuming what you post is true to you and not something else... I feel your pain. I really do not have anything to share other than to read the honesty of MarketEaters replies. I really feel your pain. Denial, stubbornness, passion, fear, greed and emotion are all powerful words that can be used to reflect on a persons journey. ElectricTheMarketisaCasinoSavant
Actually I do have something to share. truth is to know lies bravery is to face fear to lose first then win could be a possibility. ElectricSavant
Some people lose and keep losing until they get tired of it..call it a complex or whatever...the really sad part is WHEN they win they can never repay the lost time. I am speaking from experience. Read my posts carefully as I never said that to lose first to win had to be in trading. It may very well be in trading for this thread author...but how can we ever know the truth on an anonymous trade site? I hope that someone is helped by this thread and Thank You to the thread author...and Good LUCK.. ES P.S. One last thing. All traders are competing with each other. The best traders adapts and wins money. The market does not know your condition. The market is not random because of the existence of trends in my opinion. So it is not hopeless...just a casino P. S. S. Now here is the confusing part. I do not like to talk about myself personally but I am a non-competitve spirit. I win by discovering how "I want to trade profitably".
why [most] systems fail? it is because the market keeps on giving buy and signals one after the other. Which signal to take? The one which is most likely?As Brooks and many others say CONSIDER THE CONTEXT? This is what confused me for a decade and confusion appears, to the the prime by product of markets and also the prime reason reason why 95% of traders, including myself, lose. Where do these conflicting signals come from? i suspect from a different time frame. This is why many traders watch more than one time frame and only when they line up, do they take a trade or signal.This however results in long periods of waiting,and also makes you miss trade signal in the time frame that is being watched. In the same chart, i have drawn one trend line showing an series of higher lows [a up move] and on the same chart[and same place] i have drawn another trend line,showing a series of lower high [a down move] and it is possible, one trader will say up move, another will say downmove, one will say the other is wrong, but both will make money, if they manage it.It is quite possible a third will say range and he MAY TRADE IT AS SUCH and he too will make money. A fourth trader may say triangle and a fifth say "NO NO NO IT IS N0ISE" So in this situation-markets do not stay in one situation-you have 3 bias and, if the trader is convinced that the bias he sees is correct and if he trades it, according to that conviction and with confidence, he will make money. In fact all 3 traders will make money. So it is not true if one trader makes money the other will lose:this is the wonder of the markets. In fact it may be one of the few activities that always rewards excellence
Market provides astronomical amount of information on pricing movement, the art or science of building a wining strategy is to manipulate/interpolate/filter these information to extract the hidden signals for entry and exit, and once you are successful at that, trading is an exciting business. You can not depend purely on the raw data, it would make your head spin, you need a smart way to process them.
I have traded for years too and only fairly recently started to show profits. There is so much BS out there on Utube etc. No wonder it is confusing. There used to be big names like Gann, Livermore etc. but on inspection turned out to be hiding their failures by departing into the mystical nonsense. The ones that can won't tell and the ones that can't aren't worth listening to.
i too, and no doubt thousands or millions of others, have had similar, if not identical, experiences. There can be no doubt that the rubbish has to be learn't first: a child does not value a diamond because he has not seen the other rubbish. i think Livermore Gann Elliot were better than most, if not they would not be famous.But you may not have found their methods suited to you:if not why did not Gann use Elliot wave and Livermore not use Gann? Why did they spend considerable time and effort developing their method for which they became infamous? But the sheer irony of this, is that i know there are pros using the same ideas you have described as BS and making a good living put of it! I have read of pro who has traded a moving average cross over system all his life,for 25 years. It all boils down to how good a trader do you want to be: do you want just to make money and make a good living? Nothing wrong with it. Just how good do you want to be? And how much time and effort are you willing to expend to go the extra distance? My goal ten years back was not to just day trade,not just be profitable but to be the best day trader in the world.i am getting there and when i get there it is very easy to prove that you are THE best: in trading it is all black and red.
even if they did, how will it fit your financial emotional psychological make up:the method that the second richest man employed is no secret;and yet how many persons have the make up and temperament to copy what he did and hold a stock for 50 years? Just imbibe what the great traders say,digest what you can,evacuate what you cant, and benefit from what you have assimilated.