Thank you for your comments. Probably you are mostly correct. You may change your mind in the near future. Today's trades. Gabe
I may appear to have no idea what I am looking at, and I may be petrified but these are my results. The last 10 days are trades of NQ only. Gabe
The difference between trading sim and real is as clear as black and white but it's not even remotely close to the difference between trading your own money v. OPM. I was down 3% with OPM when I first started and it took me 6 weeks to make it back. Once I went + I took off. Had it been my own money I would have made the 3% within a day or two. Trading Psychology can't be quantified but at some point you gotta get naked and get in the water.
Last time I got naked, I almost drowned. Trading sim is like being in a swimming pool at the shallow end while trading live could be like swimming in a perfect storm. To continue the analogy, if we see that a perfect storm is coming, we should stay in the port anchored down. Gabe
I was telling the other day to one of the members here on ET that I envy him because of his ability to tell/write a story around what he sees in the PA of the market. I always thought that writing down quick and dirty rules should be sufficient. I was thinking today that under certain circumstances I would be able to make up a vague story to explain what/why price moves the way it moves (not the HH-HL or DB DT type but the general move) but then I thought about the countless examples of people observing a phenomena and acting upon it based on their previous experience, without really understanding the cause of the phenomena. The first such idea that came to my mind was the Salmon run (the Journey of the Wild Salmon) and the bears who eat them. The bear don't really understand why the Salmon show up every year at the same time at the same place, yet the Salmon does show up and the bears are ready. Take a simple thing like the sky clouding over. One does not have to understand why the sky is clouding over but it is a good idea to take an umbrella or a rain coat. Good trading setups are like the sky is clouding over (but in a positive way). The formation of the clouds is not identical - just like trading setups - but there is a good chance that if the conditions are right, it will rain. Do we need to know how clouds form or why the Salmon are coming to use that knowledge? (these days with cloud seeding it is obviously a good idea to know how the clouds form but years ago it was not critical knowledge). Now lets assume that some people who have observed many cloud formations can predict which one will give us rain and which will not, but the accuracy of their predictions will vary even though they will be able to tell us some rules based on which they make their predictions. Now for the novice cloud watcher, just memorizing the rules, will not be enough to predict with any degree of accuracy the possibility of rain, unless they will be watching for a long time the clouds form. I hope that my point is clear even if making it took longer than I thought. Gabe