@bundlemaker and all the rest, I have been on this journey from February, and I can say that I've made good progress through these months. Sometimes I've gotten stuck – at one point I went ahead and I was already trading (breakeven-minimum loss). When I noticed problems or temporary blocks, I stepped back to basic – drawing channels and annotating. And then started adding the tools back again – slowly. But all of my biggest aha moments came after I took – a couple of times – time off for vacations at the seaside. Sometimes as long as whole a month off From what I went through, I can advise the following – be aware though that I am a beginner, who has never traded before. I started to become interested in trading in the middle of last year after a "black swan" event in my life. As I was studying I became aware that sitting behind the monitor all day, everyday (15h+ per day – I live in Europe and have a job in the morning). In the long run this gets me to focus on tasks at hand and rigid (due to tiredness) to allow my brain to accept and process my learning and to form strong concepts. The answer lies in taking breaks to recoup and relax. Getting ahead of myself in the process of learning. When you are trying to learn as fast as you can you sometimes overestimate yourself and your current ability. I found myself trading already in March and April (with no prior trading experience and minimum starting capital!). Looking back it was a very foolish thing to do, but fortunately I recognized it and took a step back. I started from scratch again, and sim-traded after a while. I found out that I was too focused on the result (of a sim trade!) and had to go back again. It took me a while to (quite recently – a month or two ago) be able to sim trade as a means to assess my current set of skills and not to focus on some number. I assess every so often what I'm actually doing through the session. If I don't have the right focus, I go back to basics for a couple of days – just monitoring and annotating. Understanding the basics – I have come to the point where it clicked (at least I would like to believe so ). I understood the basic of what the fractal nature (forest, trees,..) of the market is and correlation between P/V. What helped me personally was this exercise I did for a week after I came back from the seaside. I was unable to really tell where the market is at and what it is doing – forest level FTT or bugz. Don't know if it will help you, but you can give it a try. Exercise: Monitoring the forest by doing something else – I was painting during the trading session. Every so often (once every 5-10 min or even longer periods) I would come to the monitor and check – forest up – and draw a channel. If I saw an FTT, it didn't matter it was still forest up until proven otherwise (B2B or R2R over several bars!). The point was to recognize what was going on in the market at the forest level and to do it in the near past as to avoid prediction as much as possible. This allowed me to understand forest/trees/.. (through monitoring only) much better. Then it's just a matter of moving from immediate past to now (which involves " analysis" of current events). But do try and find some hobby you like that relaxes you so that the mind is not preoccupied with the market. Take it easy, I notice that if I am uneasy and restless (not knowing what is happening in the market for example) I tend to second-guess my actions and analyses, turn direction many times and too soon in my analysis. I'm still learning and it is better to see if I did an error and to understand why, then to focus on being right all the time. Take all I have said with a grain of salt, this is just what I experienced and not necessarily correct in all regards. But I feel good at my current progress and comfortable to continue and see that the path I have chosen is for me. Though I do not yet trade! I am still struggling with some concepts and tools, but I do feel the wheels in my brains are starting to turn. ---------- I practice aikido, and this practice teaches that if you are tense and rigid – mind or (and) body – you can't perceive and act well. It will not do you good if you try and go head-on through the wall – you might end up hurting yourself. Water splashes off the wall, to return, finding cracks and paths around it.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I agree that doing something else you enjoy while forest trading helps to keep you 1) in the forest and 2) relaxed. In my case, a couple of my best forest days were actually when I was in bed, with my laptop on my chest, hitting the snooze alarm every 5 minutes to check the action, check my position, and get another 4:30 of sleep. Folks in the chat room started calling me "snooz_trader." Laugh all you want, but my sim score was absolutely sick
4. How do you find the happy medium between hyper over-analysis and complete disinterest? (i.e. how do you get yourself into the state of optimal performance versus arousal.) Can you even verbalize what you do?
12:45 bar killed my up channel by BO on inc vol and the next bar also closes below my up channel. I now looked for pt 3 for my down channel and I got price moving back on on dec vol. I do not draw channels unless I have 3 seperaate points (for me this is how I can match up things better) so I used 12:35 as my Ftt (instead of the 12:15 bar) . I watched the DOM very carefully but anticipated a pt 3 so when I could "feel" the momentum about to break down I shorted. The moment I sold I was .50 in the money and price just sat there. I was feeling a bit uneasy as the vol was dead but I knew the situation was a good one so just because it wasnt tanking right away I kept in mind that I had correctly read everything in this situation. Also, since I didnt have a down channel yet in place, I did not see the 13:00 bar as a flaw.
Steve, Thanks for the additional feedback on the pt 3, much appreciated. It helps to read the thought process of someone else to view things from a different view point. Although I wasn't glued at 13:00, I'm pretty sure I would have had the short channel in place along with the tape retrace (B part of R2B). I would have viewed the 13:00 bar as a flaw in the retrace. But I'm prolly going to far down the rabbit hold, lol. Hopefully, I would have seen the 13:06:20 increasing red, the continuation of another R2B. Thanks, spooz
Frustratingly, I 'saw' the two FTT's happening but didn't pull the trigger, which turned 10 points of profit into 5 of loss chasing it. Thankfully made it up on the range expansion (exited at the last bar on this chart) <a href="http://imageshack.us"><img src="http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/576/es08sep07vd1.png" border="0" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us"/></a><br/> Ignore the times, they are Australian local time. Haven't gotten around to changing my database config.