Here is mine without letting the genie out of the bottle: It doesn't matter if you were born as a sultan or a street urchin. You need to visit the Cave of Wonders and find and stroke the magic lamp to get to the Holy Grail. It is only then that you can take your portfolio on a magic carpet ride up and obtain your princess.
1. Eliminate you bad trades 2. Eliminate you bad trades 3. Eliminate you bad trades 4. Make money on the few good trades
You’re one of the few who gets it. Having a methodology with a positive expectancy is important (one cannot make money consistently without an edge), there is no question about it. However, when it comes to consistent, flawless execution, then the psychology / mindset takes over, and most traders start to fall apart because our brains are not wired for efficient decision making and for dealing with uncertainty. The above does not play such a big role with small accounts, but the bigger the account and the faster the TFs, the more important psychology / mindset becomes. To consistently execute without mistakes and hesitation, we need to “train” our brain for peak performance and to master ourselves because when trading we're actually asking our brain to do something that is diametrically designed against. Most of us are actually blind to our own issues, and for majority of people this becomes major obstacle, and they try to overcome it by seeking “holy grail”. (Transferring their issues onto the market). Been there, done that myself. People just want to make heaps of money, and believe that buy/sell signals is the only edge they need. I used to be the same. It took me years to finally accept that self-mastery is a huge edge in the market. Before the realization, I always wrongly assumed that once I become profitable, then I’ll have a look at what the mindset / psychology “nonsense” is all about. Ironically, only after I got my shit together did things begin to fall into place. These days, the more people disagree with me on the importance of peak performance mindset / psychology, the more confirmation it gives me that we really “trade our beliefs”. Understanding this, and working on and maintaining peak performance mindset is huge edge over those traders who only focus on TA.
I'm not a book browsing robot looking for goodies to put in my language model, if that's what you're suggesting. The principle of a wandering range vs. a running trend should be one of the first lezzons in Elite Trading 101 for fuzzies
I'll list two that I think are important. 1) Don't enter a trade on a prediction, but rather as a reaction. Jumping into a trade because the setup looks 100% like it's about to run is a setup meant to pull in weak hands. Rather, enter with a stop market entry when it breaks a certain price for a higher probability play. 2) If your system is setup for probability plays, and the math has checked out, treat it like jumping into cold water. Don't keep sim trading it. You've already backtested it. Don't be scared to run it on every setup and allow it to run it's course. If this means trading a single share of stock, or micro contract, do that. Scale up as you feel comfortable.
I've come to the point of using just an EMA and price action. I don't think daytrading is possible without TA. You certainly can't use news or fundamentals.