I have been spending too much time watching my account value hourly, checking each position, trying to squeeze a few more ¢ when doing a trade. I have tried somthing new this week, I am not doing any trade myself & I am not loging in to my account. I am telling my asistant in the begining of the week what buys or sell I want to do this week for what price range ( I am more of a longer term value investor), he can do it any time during the week, and I don't care if he buys a position for 75.11 or for 75.24 I keep my focus on, tracking what my strategies are doing, watching the overall market, backtesting, devalope new ideas etc. It sounds a much more productive approach, do you agree with that opproach?
I absolutely favor this new approach of yours. In fact, depending on the time frame, traders should be doing that, too. We set our stop and the rest will be taken care of by the market anyway. We cannot control where the price is heading to, so we only deal with what we can control: risk (or margin of error). It's less pressuring and you get to spend your time with other matters. Since you are a value investor, I wonder why you haven't been doing it all this while? Of all strategies, that should be the one which ties you least to the screen.
I have the same problem as well. Staring at the screen is unproductive. I recently changed my setup so that it is run off of spreadsheets with bloomberg prices. It makes my risk model instantaneous on a mouseclick but static otherwise. I also put a blank page over one screen (where the spreadsheet resides) that says "NO SCREEN WATCHING" It's helped but I still spend time staring.
The standart way is to trade ane monitor yourself. It was just a new idea that I came up recently to be out of that part.
Yeah, I have a team of assistants (trained Gerbils rescued from NYC bathhouses) who handle my simple executions. I take care of the complex stuff, which ironically have much longer average durations. So yeah, I am with you on this. It's just hard to keep these little dudes on task.
Get one of your assistants to order a True treadmill and buy a USB DAC and some good headphones. It's therapy for the ADHD among us. I don't know what I'd do without my assistants and the music makes me far more productive (in ordering more assistants). I think I am going to take a break to play "Alpine Football" with the Kennedys.
I was going to start a new thread about that. I have made multiple mistakes that cost me thousands of dollars of missed profits in past 2-4 weeks, simply by watching the screen all day and allowing price swings and prices to influence me to change my thoughts and decision on entries and exits. Trading on price alone and/or simply on P/L does not work for me. If I had been in a coma for most of the past month, I would be up a significant amount over my "real-time" decisions made by watching most ticks on my positions. I'll give you an example from today. Since 1996 I have traded ESRX. But I stopped trading 5 1/2 years ago. Decided to dabble and got back in in June. This week I accumulated a position in ESRX. But by watching it's price action yesterday (when it sold off in front of earnings - which I knew would not be a big deal since they had pre-announced), closed out Nov 37.50c. Further I bought January puts and only spread 1/2 of the November against. Sure enough if I had done nothing I would have cleaned up today when the stock popped 4+ I made something but by watching the g-damn stock all week, it somehow played with my mind and influenced me to "worry' about whether it would fill the gap around 36. The calls went from 3.50 to 6.50+. But I got out of 1/2 of them, after watching the damn screens all day yesterday. When I made my decision to enter ESRX long, it was based on accumulated intuition and experience, without emotion after examining the chart and fundamentals. Thus it was probably my best decision. The decision to close some longs was based on emotions influenced by watching the screens all day. Back in 1994 I met a woman who had traded on the CBOT; she was very knowledgeable about trading and the markets. She advised me not to watch the screen or the markets constantly. She said it would influence my earlier decisions and planning that were formulated at a time when my/your analytical and decision-making skills were/are best (maybe in the evening or morning). At said time I likely applied my best intuition, ideas and experience planning out a move. She suggested keeping target levels/alerts and checking in periodically to monitor. That might be every 15-30 minutes or even at open and end of day, depending on your paradigm, and time-frame. I am trying to make that part of my plan. Today I went out to lunch and set alerts, and orders. Sure enough it worked out. Stopped me from pulling the trigger too soon or a buy or sell. I am a discretionary guy and do not day trade much other than when I see a good opportunity to trade around a core position in one of the 4-7 equities that I trade at any one time.
I had a real account and a paper account trading basically the same thing, but it got busy and I got too worn out to check the paperaccount. After a week the paper account was up 20% more than the real account, because nobody was there to take profits.