Mreh, no comment. I've been watching nostalgic stuff. I miss NYC, don't wanna' argue silly trading stuff this weekend.
My son has been playing in a tournament for the past few days and I got into an interesting conversation about the psychology of winning (they've only lost one game out of 8 after losing all the games in the last tournament.) Of course, their skills are improved but the parent said one very interesting thing: when you are winning, you are thinking more about the next good play. When you are losing, you are thinking more about the last bad loss. Can you train yourself to think as if you are winning? Should you? Don't know.
Your mind listens to what you say to it, so you can say things like, Ok, no big deal, the next play will be good. Its just simple self motivation, but you have to say it so you can hear it. Lots of science supportive material out there for stuff like this.
Had a great day thanks to zerohedge causing a mini flash crash. I bought with both hands and made a nice exit once it was determined that it was old news. I was already up nicely though when I went to close that position I accidentally reversed it and lost a bit. I felt no reaction after this other than to fix up my process to avoid this in the future (basically, put in a take profit automatically.) I feel good, but quite frankly one of the issues I have is I hemmed and hawed about how I should close my position. Should I scale out? In the end I closed it outright, but I suspect I should have stayed in the position. The feeling is that there is a bit of regret here. How best to deal with this to make use of it productively? What can you really do with regret? My sense is that once I have done this for long enough, I will start to get a feeling for when I am being too greedy and when it is obvious that the market is going to keep going in a favorable direction. I love this game.
Great job Mcnoob, Just say it out load, I did an awesome job and getup and walk away. If you don't keep it regular it won't be regular, and if you try to soak up every drop you'll be the one getting soaked. Think about how bad that will feel, that's how you train yourself just redirect the bad thought and think the what if and that's all it takes. The markets will be there when you get back.
That's easy. Just listen to the following, but replace the dialog with what I type below... "Open your system... Enter the trade... set your exit point, and... Profit is green? Mind is clean. The regret is safely discarded in the "I made money today with my system" facility."
This is actually a good point. I'm not yet comfortable trading with size if you remember my previous post and our discussion on it. Today was actually just as big (little bigger) than the WW3 trade. I had no qualms about going in this time! No blackouts, I remember everything. Looks like reflecting on things and no doubt talking through it with you helped.
That's great that what we talked about helped you in some way. Always nice to see folks making profit. For me today I was watching the market all morning looking for an entry, getting a feel for it, and right before I was thinking, OK, looks like we have an "up-into-the-close-type day" because of the impending trade deal signing, the tariff news broke and spiked the shit down in an instant. Hell, NQ dropped like 40 points in minutes. So then the market did it's nervous jig into the close not knowing what the hell it should do, so had to stay out. Zero live trades. And my reads on the other instruments was not much better in sim. I upped my size to 2 contracts on the trades, and was down $2,800 at one point. Managed to get myself back to only -$800 by end of trading. I consider it a victory in sim in recovering that much back, but regret that it got that deeply red in the first place. CL and GC were just a bugger today for me. I could not grasp what kind of PA I was seeing on the charts. Tomorrow shall be "interesting", to say the least with regard to the trade deal ceremony (if it actually happens? Sheesh, can never tell with these guys sometimes).
Getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. I'm in a trade I knew would bring some discomfort so using Zodiac's idea of verbalizing the thoughts, I said to myself that I know it will be uncomfortable for X period of time. Whether it works out or not, being uncomfortable is getting more comfortable.