I pretty much started out as an IBD fan (had to start somewhere) I loved t/a. Then next up put the t/a on the back burner and focused on fundamentals, for this I needed help. After about 2 years of that I couldn't present an arguement on how the fundamentals were not going to play out according to their score card. They were wrong and I ended up being right. Of course I never told anyone. It was just a feeling. Now about this feeling. I spent time on the psychology of the market and this is where I found my home. This is not to say t/a and fundies don't play a part, they do, but now it's a cocktail. Everyone is different, so while we may arrive with the same conclusions, we all use a different map. I don't believe it's "one thing", more like a process of elimination.
The one thing that changed my trading is when I realized this: Markets can do only 2 things, they continue, or they change.
Do I understand the implication of it correctly: go long the continuation, and get out if there is a change (and do not guess, etc). First leads to the profits, the second leads to costs.
There is no 'one' thing that will change your trading. It's a combination of things. All of them together (in sync) is what takes you to the next level.
NM makes a good point He labels it is a processâ¦., I label it a journey â same differenceâ¦. I can guarantee I didnât wake up one day and say â okay today I will think like this⦠--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I went through a lot of trial and error; read trading in the zone (four times)⦠even rewrote each chapter so I understood it. Read numerous other books, attended a formal class, studied FA & TA, ⦠Journaled â till I was blue in the face⦠Blew up a couple of timesâ¦, started over more than once⦠laid my charts bare and stared at them for weeks on endâ¦yadaâ¦yadaâ¦yada⦠btw I found the â cut winners short, let losers run â period of my trading quite enjoyable⦠HA But through it all I continued â and one day it clicked⦠------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So I would like to amend my original explanation and say... The one thing that changed my trading is perseverance⦠and I think all successful traders share it⦠RN
one thing that changed everything in my trading is position sizing based on reasonable risk parameters. basically everything was working ok for me until i reached the point in my trading when overconfidence lead me to ignore my previous risk parameters. a couple of bad trades (well, more than a couple) quickly followed and seriously damaged my account. now i again believe in setting up reasonable risk parameters. we shall see how it goes...
My experience has not been a "one thing that changed everything in my trading" on this day mm/dd/yyyy forward. Rather, the journey has been a gradual transformation from one discovery to another discovery. I believe all knowledge is a gradual build-up. New knowledge that is based on old knowledge and then some. I am a math and astronomy fan. So let me provide an analogy to my trading skill development: The ancient Greeks developed geometry and algebra Introducing the Arabic numbers and the concept of zero ... fast forward... Copernicusâs theory: Earth around the Sun instead of the other way around. Sir Issac Newton discovered the law of gravity and invented calculus. We discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which revolve around in our Milky Way, which is only one of the many billions of galaxies rapidly expanding... Albert Einstein introduced that time and space are used together, relativity Stephen Hawking's theories on black holes Now the development of many theories such as the Superstring theories, parallel universies, dark matter, dark energies, the Big Bang theory and so on... You see... with each new discovery, we seem to gain a higher level of knowledge but it is based on prior knowledge. We just understand the details a little more or understand the generality or special cases and boundary conditions. In my view: Trading skills are like that too. You first thought you understood how the market moved. But started to observe some anomalies. Then you came to a higher level of understanding that accounted for the "anomalies". Then you developed better skills. The process iterates when you observe more anomalies with your higher level of understanding.
The day -or year - that I stopped fighting the market was the turning point for me. Really, the market is going where it wants to go. I'm sure there are those here that can predict it's direction but I'm not one of them. Sometimes the smartest thing is to just say, "I don't know". JMO