Holy grail = understanding yourself (strengths, weaknesses, pyschological baggage and potential subconscious sabotage that will interfere with discretionary trading... if you have none then the human brain is inherently a bad trader so understanding human pyschology also very important) + understanding the market and trading it with a methodology you make your own. Strategy is "surface layer" its not important, there are so many ways to kill it in the market. Under psychology, I would say have a growth mindset, very important as well. The idea is that skill is something that can be developed almost infinitely regardless of innate ability, where your focus is on improvement rather than making money. The latter will mean you set yourself expectations and your emotions will rise and fall with your pl. Easy way to blow and account or underperform. E.g. you might miss trades and trades less size when you are in profit out of fear of giving it back, trade more size and impulsively when you are down money to make it back.
Holy grail: absolute control of losing trades, until and unless you have that you will never make GOOD money. To get absolute control of losing trades you need to accept that trade is gambling and losing is an integral part of the game. Now, to accept that some trades will be losers you need to figure out where to put your bets with very low risk of losing and good probability of winning big enough if you are right. I know I can place a stop at less than 5c from my entry point and that my loser will be small, but if I am right I will be in for at least 40c. Imagine how many times I can afford to be wrong if I am right just once or twice in a day? By the way, forget about patterns (at least in the classical TA sense) and focus on what is happening in real TIME (= Money)... Spend many hours of screen TIME (=Money) until you can see what is actually happening, then you will start making GOOD Money.
I agree with the sentiment in that it is a form of gambling but I think it's important to not *embrace* it as gambling. IMO, the more one can make it less about gambling, the better. There are obviously strong cross-overs, but I don't believe this is a game purely about probability. I'm not talking about fundamentals-based trading, I just mean attempting to understand what is actually going on with price behind the scenes, be it within the next 5m, 15m, or 2w (whatever your preferred time frame is).
Holy Grail? You need to come up with something truly original, not only technically but more importantly conceptually that is beyond those conventional concepts like supply and demand, support and resistant so on and so forth.
Hi i960, of course it is not a game of probability, i would never suggest to place trades at random. The gambling concept is only to state the obvious: there is no way, method, indicator, technique that can tell us with certainty which way price will go in the next moment. This is obvious but most (if not all) traders start with the assumption that to make money trading you need to find a way to "predict" where price will go and this frame of mind can only lead to disasters as the trader will Assume to know something that he cannot know. This said, I believe that price moves for very good reasons that have nothing to do with simple Supplies/Demand, as Traders we need to understand what is behind price movement as with that understanding we can identify low risk area where to put our trades. With that understanding and many, many hours of screen time (real time is much more useful that looking at past charts) we can learn to recognize these low risk areas and be able to trade with very low risk (as I said, I can trade with Stops at less than 5c from entry point as I know that either price goes in my direction or it doesn't. This eliminate the fear and hope that is a disaster for traders (at least it has been so for me).
I have two automated systems, they are as close to the "Holy Grail" in terms that fit me, very low risk and losses. Everyone might have different definitions to what Holy Grail may be. Did I "discover" them? LOL, not in a heart beat, both were of extremely long hours of mistakes. Ever hear of systems sold which has some number at the end of it? Like Spike 35, took 35 tries to make a trend following system, took me over 200 attempts to come up with using an indicator and reversed engineered it to make it do what I wanted to try. Will I own the world with it, will never to attempt. When you become too good at something, am very sure bells and whistles goes off somewhere and they will take information based on ones trading and figure it out like I would. It just better to blend in with other trades. Hogs get slaughtered like the Hunt Brothers trying to make a killing in Silver. Exchanges putting in rules where you can't take new positions on long side, there will always be those who have strength enough to stop one from taking over. Trading is like playing golf, if you want to be a good weekend player, you out then each night practicing after work hitting balls, but if you want to turn Pro, you out there at 5am till dark hitting balls for years cause you going to play against same type of players.
The type of trader that would post this is one that has "been there and done that" Refreshing to read, as is it truth ! It is the same method I use and before I adopted it I was aimless and losing. Hopefully the penny will drop for those that read and believe in it. +2 M/addict
While a good golf club allows you to hit the ball farther, and with more accuracy, the Grail would be to putt with the Grand Canyon as the hole.