Pulling the trigger

I have an issue perhaps you can help me with. I've been a successful trader, then recently I have had a string of consecutive bad trades as I tried to tweak my system. The losses were not devastating, but enough to plant a seed of doubt.

I have since returned to my old system. Before.. with the old system I could pull the trigger on a trade with confidence and be profitable. Now that I have returned to it, I have found trouble entering a trade. I have seen many setups come and go without me getting in. It makes me picture a starving grizzly bear standing by a stream, watching the salmon swim by, and not reaching in and getting what could be mine. I have forced myself to make trades since switching back, and the trades have been profitable (5/5) . I know the system works, it is just so difficult getting back to my prior comfort level.

 

Ask yourself this.


What are the consequences of not making the trade?

 

5/5 profit trades – say you… Well woo pity flippin doo – say I

You haven’t been a successful trader – you’ve been a lucky trader (learn the difference)


The first chance to actually earn money as a trader – it appears you buckled, and turned scared…

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Your help

Come to terms with what a trader is…, and then nut up

You have some work to do before nutting up…

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A trader is a risk manager first…

A trader earns his/ her money by managing losses… not by placing winning trades – any idiot can do that

And

A trader does not run from losses, instead he/ she embraces them

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I suppose I could stroked your ego and tell ya it’s going to be alright…, or ease back in to it, this is just a passing phase

Heck I can even tell you the market has changed and all you need do is adapt to it..., or wait till the conditions are conducive to your system

But then I’d be full of shit

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Fact is; you are evading, and scared of - the very thing that will either make you…, or break you – as a trader

Either step up…., or step aside

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In a separate thread you first posted about wanting to trade your family’s / friend’s money

You don’t get a handle on this before trading your family’s / friend’s money – you will royally fuck them over

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You speak of 5 for 5 winners as if it means something – B.F.D.

When you can talk about 5 out of 5 losers, or more – in a row…, and how you managed through them and kept trading without missing a beat – that’s making money the trader way

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With deference to NM – you better be asking yourself;

What will the consequences be of making this trade, if I can not willingly accept a loss… Especially when opm and trust are involved.

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Simply something to ponder, or not

RN

 

getting an edge is not easy. And gaining knowledge that this is actually an real edge is real hard.

maybe even harder is to ignore 'fake' edges.

For this, time is required.


my guess, you know now that your edge foundations have been shaken.

if you had an real edge, you knew it was just temporary stuff and would not bother you, even after 10 consecutive losses.

misery of losing is the best teacher. Make sure you can recover after.

Except if you have someone willing to share, of course.

 

Go take a week off and go on vacation, don't think about work, have fun, clear your head. Come back fresh and start over.

 

It may be a good time to improve your old system:

A good BUY/SELL signal usually gives a trader more than one reasons to long/short. By examining price action, technical indicators, volume, etc. you may be able to find an extra reason to pull the trigger. Hopefully, the additional filter will increase your win rate and confidence.

If your strategy cannot be improved systematically, you may need to start from scratch.

 

The fear of one thing outweighs the fear of another.

Getting through this is like: accept the pain, shut up and trade.

As a temporary solution it may work very well. But, I don't think it should be used as a tool to condition myself.

They talk about a problem like this on other threads. As much as I don't like the true "fix", it seems that there's no other way around it but to reduce your size to eliminate the fear factor and trade until your confidence is back.

 

RN,

5/5 trades went + after returning to my old system. I am not trying to impress you.

My problem is that System A was profitable, I tried to improve upon it by creating System B. System B was more like 4/11 trades + and the negatives were larger than the positives. At this point I scrapped System B. I went back to System A and have been profitable since. I was confident with the original system, the confidence has been rattled by System B's failure. I need to regain confidence so that I can resume using System A.

 

Sounds like you need to start small again to get your confidence back. Build it back up over time.

As you obviously know, confidence is everything in this game...

 

I would immediately get any piece of paper and pen => start to write a paragraph on why you are having doubts.

Just keep writing and writing... What sort of feelings arise when you are in doubt? Then pursue the reasons behind the feelings however filmsy... There are always logics behind the emotions even though they might seem crooked. The idea is to make the reason for the doubt concrete and not to suppress them. You want to list the clear reasons (however ilogical) behind the emotions. Then you work from here.

I would say the cheapest way is to go sim for a while to figure out the state of things because:

1) Why do you want to tweak the system in the first place?
2) Increase the awareness during trading (whether sim or not) and see how the preceived edge fails and keep a written logs.

If your perceived edge does not work in the environment or time of day (happened to me), then you would be just pissing your money away.