I think this is going to be my last post re: Jack. I really dont care in the least what people think about him or his teachings. I have made a number of posts not really to defend him as he certainly doesnt need me or anyone else to defend him, but rather to get those few people who really want to learn to get past all the bs and check him out for themselves. The information is all out there. I dont have any more questions for the man. I have all the information that I need but I will always look forward to his posts. Happy trading.
Easy, your balance re Jack is admirable, but I submit that he DOES need you to defend him. He desperately needs an amanuensis, a Bosworth if you will, and always has. In his writings he comes across as an idiot savant. He is only comprehensible through a herculean effort to form a gestalt from the totality of his posts. I would do it myself, but alas I am not a true believer, only one who went down his rabbit hole and came up the wiser for meeting the Jabberwocky. Were I to try I would only come across as his Pancho Sanza. Regards, Al.
It is definitely a keeper and worth running through a lot of considerations. i llok at moat traders as probably emeging from an edge orientation as they discover so many workable edges. Make a table of av profits for each class of edge and rank them all as well. You see the permanent ones as class leaders as well. Then you can see how the entries and exits of each get to either overlap (not too common) or leave set gaps from the exit to an entrance. there is a peramnet theme in ET on poor exits that has a twin theme around correct exits. All the too early discussion centers on not being able to break away intellectually from the entry. All the too late discussion centers on holding through the optimum profit levels. If you then "see" both of these themes as "missing the putt" as a lack of putting skill instead of money fright caused by repeated unskilled failures, you get to how to deal with the mental issue that is claoked in emotional stuff caused by "sensing" bad putts. Peeling back the emotions can be done by not dealing with their cause (the lousy exit being repeated). So I push the exit issues right off the table and go to a hold and reverse conditional mentality. It is an outright miracle to get to "hold and reverse" as a strategy. Since this is the limiting strategy for efectiveness and efficiency and it only depends upon handling NOW, it breaks with all the bullshit of allother apporaches. AND that is one giant pile of myths. So a person sits there and deals only with the part o his traing not associated with risk::::: the entry. emotions leading up to entry are optimisitc ones. a switch turns on optimism. then once entry is achieved, the mind whips to the failure syndrome bult out of the pile of myths people use to convince themselves that "this edge entry is just going to have to work this time. It doesn't because of too soon and too late. Too soon often prevails as a direct antidote to enduring pain of self bullshitting. So why not just lean into the post entry period with "optimism of simulating another entry as permission to hold. Or just as good an simulating an entry into the opposite market condition (a reversal in effect). BOTH OF THESE MONITORING EFFORTS GET A PERSON TO A PLACE WHERE THE HOLD OF HOLD AND REVERSE IS COMING INTO BEING AND EMERGING OUT OF EDGELAND. They are also annilating lousy putting problems. And they constantly remind the trader of the foibles of leaving early and holding past optimum. It is like looking at the list of foilbles as stacked vertically to form an inverted catinary (upside down gaussianform) continuum of mistakes for not holing out. It is amazing to be able to knock down, one after another the myths of leaving at the wrong time. You knock them to smithereens with reasons to take on another opposite trade or to renew you confidence in the direction you are currently making profits in. Reasons knock out myths. as you continue to feel the relief of "not losing" it is replaced with "continuing good emotions". Continuing good emotions s related to holds leads right to the feelings of goodness regarding a reversal when you not long have a reason to hold. At first, you look for a new entry and see big reasons to "enter over and over. the reasons grow smaller and smaller but they are there. they appear over and over as you mentally continue to REPEAT a process do decide. At some point it gets to machs nix (spelled literally). A no matter time. the no matter time is mostly not a spike time but a rounded extreme where the delta (change function) is minimized. You have found the place where nothing matters and nothing is happening. NO tidal change. Then you see reasons appearing for another but opposite entry. The anti BO called the reversal. I have described things as a person would with ever growing confidence of being able to do a routine optimistic thing (choose an entry). i did the original post in an unsual way.. Lots of caps and dots. I wanted the impact then. Now after it has marinate for a while...I want to get down to brass tacks and look at things from every angle possible. This post starts that process by looking at some cardinal ET fashions that people wear that trap them. Getting out of these is so exciting if it can be done before the reptileans crap sets in. do you see how looking for an ege set up is thinking about what the monitoring means in terms of knowledge about , at least, something that has been learned. It also keeps that leanring item on the table and prvents the fear/myth switch from being thrown to trigger lousy putting land. Then you see that the errors going from worst to less worse are each overcome by monitoring with reason. All, etc...... This is a zinger like the solution to the father mistakes. There are many many zingers yet to come. The looking for entries continually does get you to what an exit really is. That is the other half of this coin. ET is fairly far away from thinking up what exits are so far... maybe that day will come sometime too.
Much appreciated Jack. This is one psychological concept that I have no problem grasping. It is so obvious you wonder how it escaped you all this time.
I generally keep my peace about Grob109's diatribes against what he calls "edge" trading and the system trading mentality and approach. But the previous post and several in recent days so egregiously misrepresent my mindset, and that, I suspect, of others here, that I cannot let them lie. First, Jack, your "system" (or method, or however you want to characterize it) clearly is probabilistic, because you DO enter bad trades. As such it is characterizable by an expectation. And further, an "edge" is ANYTHING which increases expectation. Not to detract from it, but SCT is a collection of edges. SCT has rules. Every rule is an edge. You brag about your ability to "wash" and the frequency with which you do so. Now you may say what you will about the masochism of holding through a losing position, but the fact is this. A close stop is the worst strategy for every candidate system I have ever tested, from the simple to the complex. My point: you have an underoptimized system because your stop is so short. Good trades need a little room to breathe. It would be nice if one could sharpen up the entry rules to enter on those contrary "breaths", but I haven't had much luck doing so. If I have high confidence in the trade, which I usually do, I'll give it 2-3 ticks to work out. The reason? Most methods put you in a trade at about the same time. MMs know and see this, and shortly thereafter try to shake you out of it and take your good positions. So IMO one requirement of a good system is knowing when to hold against an adverse move, or even better, double down on it. From behind the 8-ball, Joe.
I agree with this and see this as one of my primary behaviour patterns that need refinement. The last point you made (knowing when to hold against an adverse move) is the most convoluted IMO. Anything that takes my profits of the table is too "adverse" for me to deal with hence I get out and look after another entry. Sometimes this method will get me the optimum profit, othertimes I am watching the price continue. I do not yet have the skills to really identify the critical price information in order to make a more favorable decision at the correct time? Is the MM messing with me? Are we reversing? What is the pertinent info? Jack, I asked about this stuff in my prior points and am curious if you have any thoughts on it. Mike
I figured as much. Were I to use stops; the row on my platform which is a market one would have twice the size of my contemporary on going hold in the market. My choice is a difficult one in the face of your situation. I pondered giving you a drill using boundaries at first, then I retrenched to a connecting the dots drill, then finally to a bunch of lines and increasing the number of lines. That was not workable for you even on a 5 minute chart which is an answer sheet in effect. Many people such as yourself run across things that they do not understand. Some try harder to understand and others are unable to recognize the challenge and so they by pass it. You and several others have arrived at changing the topic to stops. The mentality of stops is closely associated with dealing with exits. What is the connection? It is a potentially major break through in being able to think about the market. Howso? It is how BSAM's mind could be rearranged in dealling with his betting problem (predicting and betting on the prediction by entering). He cannot make a bracket entry at this point in his trading life. It is possible to set some kind of order to take you into the market when the market gets there as a risk avoidance strategy. What is setting stops? It is a setting some kind of order for the market to take you out when the market gets to that price after it has passed that price profitably, recently. I have not spoken of stops as a rule. Most can imagine that protecting against bad monitoring, bad analysis, bad decisions and untimely actions needs to be in the mix of things. The trading platform one uses has lots of rows where you can enter stuff for an assortment of reasons. Always reserve one row with a T in it for all the times that you do not know what is going on. On this row you HIT T when you do not understand how or what to monitor; when there is nothing in your mind to do analysis against with the data set you just swept; when you are unable to get a decsion based upon comparison of market data and mind knowledge; and when you are incapable of taking a timely action as a consequence of the decision you made that calls for a specific action. All the possible untaken actions form the set of rows on your trading platform at all times. What is on your trading platform for the things the market is responsible for. NADA. Zilch. If you put things on your platform that are the market's responsibility then you are making a "mistake" called usurping responsibilities of the market. All market operating points have associated risk. You are knowledgable about none of these as you begin to trade. Slowly you accumulate this info related to more and more operating points. Naturally at some point you codify two things: all the market operating points (No See attached for now) and secondly, the risk considerations are codified (no See Attachment for now) From this display you see that risk varies with market operations. And you see the means of monitoring to always know what this risk modicum of change is with each change of operating point. First derivatives of data points so to speak. We have now arrived at why line segment indicators superimposed upon price charts do not work. If a person cannot draw zig zaggy line segments to typify a segmented trading description how could he ever get to understanding how indicator line segments (they look curvy bar to bar) convey anything in time either. Stops are line segments too that look like stairs in a price time field. How can a person put in stairs in a field he cannot draw trading depictions nor understand indicator segments super imposed in that time price field? Shit he can't. He is not even in the trading ballpark. We are dealing with observational basics here. Some people here presume to know that I hold in drawdowns with stops that are too tight and all I do, after all, is give brokers money and not make any myself. What they mean to say is that they do not know much about trading and they do not know how to monitor the screen well enough to do any analysis (no knowledge base); do any decision making (no knowledge to design any strategies for any market conditions, situations nor circumstances); or do any action in a timely manner (blah). They are SOL too. Stops are used by people to protect themselves from personal monitoring defficiencies, personal voids in doing analysis; personal voids in their strategies and personal inabilites to act upon what they do not know. Tight or loose stops.......that is not the question. You may only be in the market when you know what is going on and you are equipped to deal with it. Personal stops are what is required. Have a row on your trading platform that serves the purpose of taking you out of the market every time you do not know what is going on and EVERYTHING else will take care of itself. Be a TERMINATOR!!!!!! BY stopping yourself out, you get to learn about another part of the markets operation at zero risk. You wil want to learn about what you have determined that you do not know about. If a person drew the long diagonal of every market trend formation on every fractal he watches, he would see that price follows WITHIN boundaries along a path of making money. There are NO long diagonals on any of the three trend possibilities(long, short, and lateral) that are HORIZONTAL except for high risk SLOW PACED trends. This is where all persons sideline to preserve capital. You can't make money on horizontal diagonals. Now you see that at highest risk conditions stops may not be placed since they would be on THE horizontal line. There is more and more room for stops as the diagonal line gets steeper and steeper. Naturally they are not needed when little or no risk is in the space. Maybe you can see that TERMINATOR stop actions are what is required. TERMINATOR stops are there because of your competence. When you have competence you are able to trade; Otherwise you TERMINATE. This is a zinger post I know that people who cannot draw lines that describe trading segments, cannot draw extended channels that define price operating ranges, and cannot draw long diagonals for plotting money velocity in a given money making trend. But these people can learn to, on their trading platform, have a TERMINATOR row for HITTING T. Learning about stops is not an ET discussion possibility. It is not possible to deal with stops at this level of forums. Where risk management comes into play is when people know how to make money. Getting to minumum knowledge to make money deals only with one trade. The no risk beginner trade. The TERMINATOR is used when risk appears at the end of the risk free beginner trade. For washes, the TERMINATOR may be used for the longer hold drill on washing. The Enter and pee and exit is a good precursor for the long hold washes. There are differences about what I suggest that others do and what I do. I do things that may not currently be possible for others. I do always have a TERMINATOR row. I turned on the TV after I saw 9/11 from a trader's viewpoint. Data was emerging from market sweeps immediately. TERMINATE and find out the reasons. As an architect, I could not get 911 to work to communicate impending design failure stuff immediately to the needy on 9/11. Bummer.
Ah, yes, I recall reading some of that way back, put differently this time, but very good! "Always reserve one row with a T in it for all the times that you do not know what is going on. On this row you HIT T when you do not understand how or what to monitor; when there is nothing in your mind to do analysis against with the data set you just swept; when you are unable to get a decsion based upon comparison of market data and mind knowledge; and when you are incapable of taking a timely action as a consequence of the decision you made that calls for a specific action." The uncertainTy, hahahaha! But being spare with language, I would simply have posted: "If in doubt, whip it out!"
well - it's my fault. i'm not a native english speaker - so most of the above doesn't make that much sense to me - sorry. what i think i've understood is that in your opinion stops are only for people who don't know what the market is going to do (are unable to do a correct analysis). if a trader finally arrives at being able to trade like you do - stops are simply no longer a necessity. i asked you a simple question about how many points you are willing to risk when trading the ES future. somehow you seem to be unable to give a short answer. this is ok. thank you anyway.