Agreed. That's how I trade; my trade entries and trade management rules are based on "those bars", which provide as much of the emotional story as you need to trade. YOU may need to break the rules to win; I need to follow them!
$300/day? that is a rule? treat trading like a regular job, come on. better find a regular job and forget about trading. lots of ordinary jobs can privide this number, plus with benefits such as healthcare insurance, 401k match, sick days,personal days.... often I laugh, when I see somebody posted rules like that. I do not follow those rules.
How would you define what constitutes a "Trader's Mindset" if you had to whittle it down to a sentence or two?
What kind of rule is that? Maybe $300/day is a benchmark for someone based on the statistical analysis of their trading plan, but how the heck could that be a "rule"? Would that mean if you were up $3000 on the day, you'd have to giveback $2700? :eek:
I believe a trader's mindset is the ability to follow one's trading plan without allowing the outcome of any individual trade or series of trades to cause one to deviate from the plan or change it mid-stream. I had the opportunity to watch two traders for about a year exercising a trader's mindset. That doesn't mean they never ever made a mistake, but the one guy was as close to perfect as I could imagine. He'd get signals for what to watch, and as soon as a setup formed, he'd determine the technical level where his stop loss had to be placed, calculate position size based on the price and stop size, place a buy stop or sell stop at the price level that would trigger a valid trade according to his plan, place a hard profit target twice as far away as his stop, and leave his initial stop and target no matter what. If price came within .01 of target and then eventually stopped him out for a full loss, it was on to the next trade without a worry. I saw him trade five signals one day and every trade was a losing trade. He had no more difficulty putting on the 5th trade following 4 losers than he did putting on the first trade of the day. The next day he went straight to work doing exactly what he did every day. THAT is a trader's mindset in action. Also, Ammo is a daily example of what a trader's mindset looks like in action.
I agree, in the context of having a proven profitable strategy. And I think it's funny that when Douglas describes all the things traders do to manifest a lack of this mindset, what he's really describing are traders who have no edge. So I feel like his target audience is really very very small, that is - traders who actually have an edge but fail to execute.