Actually, the only conquering to be done is the self. If the market is a woman, one must learn her moods and suppress one's own ego in order to flow with those moods. If one thinks only of himself, he will quickly find himself in an ejection seat.
Why not study these types of journals which have been posted over the past fifteen years? They're all here for anyone who wants to look them up.
I actually only know of a couple where things were done right. (ND and geez come to mind). But its ok.... I do actually know what a proper journal should look like finally, what a proper trading plan should look like, and how "easy" this all is once its all in place. If someone gave me $100 in a coin toss game for each time I'm right, but only charged me $50 for each time I'm wrong.... given that I know I'm bound to be right 50% of the time, this is a game I'd love to play! (and here we can substitute in trading for coin tossing of course!)
There are far more than a couple. Just do a search using "fame" and "search titles only". Whether they'll do any good or not is another matter. Considering that nearly everyone continues to struggle after all these years, I'd suggest not.
@dbphoenix good point Whoever introduced the inuendic notation of the "woman" has opened a can of worms it seems
Thanks.... I absolutely will look this person's journal up when I'm at work with time to kill! Why do you think everyone continues to struggle? What I see is that nobody actually has a solid plan. Maybe they do in their head, but they still don't seem to then trade it. If I had the backtesting done for a trade that appeared at least once a day with a 2:1 profit to loss ratio and a 50% win rate, well backtested over several hundred instances in various market conditions, I'd be a fool to not be sticking to it. So I can only surmise that most don't actually have a solid plan with an edge.
On CLZ4 there is one of those nodoji trendline breakout pullback set ups right now. EDIT: A limit order at 77.58 or .59 would have been filled. I think .59 would have been in accordance with nodoji's instructions. Not suggesting anything about this particular trade, only that the set up exists; and it exists with a fair degree of frequency, and your seeming inability to spot it in real time or on dead charts is puzzling to me. So I am just trying to help you out by pointing one out to you as it is happening.
Forward Testing... (still a loose trading plan.... yes... a "loose" "plan"... LOL) Going into this morning, yes its a down trend, but its choppy/ranging bars. A - SL connected with a high 10 mins before the open... not the best type of SL. B - DL across the lows (even though it is downslopping as I'm just trying to "contain" price) C - Also this hinge which is quite prominent in the 5 min chart. There is lots of action to the left, so this hinge may very well just break out in a further range... but lets see. O - Nice thing going into the open is that a break of the SL and a break of the hinge will be very close together. D - We get our break... now what. Putting everything together, the best entry still isn't clear. The RET, given that so many traders trade this way, has lots of thought behind it. Buying at the break of the trendline once price comes down also has merits. Lets track both. E - As price came up to D and came back down, we could have a buy limit order set here at 71.25. It would fill, dip a tick lower on the next bar and take off. F - The RET entry is here, lets call it 74.50 (2 ticks above the RET). Lets give this trade a stop of one tick below this bar, so 70.75. G - It looks like we double top here... but no worry... I'm just gonna let the "loose" trading plan take care of the trade. (Mind you, I have no profit target, but for now my main concerns are where the stop to get out should be) H - We come all the way down to here but never trigger the stop loss. Curiously enough people wanted to buy here until price eventually broke out above the highs at G. I - We only make it this far. If I calculate my entry as 74.50 along with my stop of 3.75 points, a profit target of 18.25 is reached. For a 1:1 trade to work, I'd need way more than a 50% win rate mind you. The entry at E is way in the money this whole time, but no idea where that stop would be for buying at the break of the trendline. J - As we come all the way down to here, which would cause me to sweat buckets, the stop still wouldn't trigger. K - Here we fail to break the highs at "I"... and its clearly more sideways action. So if I'm still holding the longs, given that we can't go higher in over 20 mins means its time to get out. CONCLUSION That's it. Being able to flip through my charts very quickly is really allowing me to see what works and what doesn't. I've started to collect more charts for the DEC contract for 2013. It took me an hour just to do 12, so I'm average one ever 5 minutes. As I do my charts, I am already backtesting in my head, but making sure to keep drawing everything all the same, and certain things do stand out over and over again. There really is a combo of entries and exits contained within these charts that I know will have a positive expectancy. I kept getting discouraged because I would think I needed to keep finding something better in case I saw a few places where it didn't work. But focusing on keeping the losses small where it doesn't work is the ticket. There simply won't be an entry in here that is going to be right 90% of the time for every chart. What I see is that sometimes the RET entry doesn't happen until price has gone quite a bit above the breakout level, but I was feeling giddy last night where I saw that the stop would still hardly every get hit. So perhaps a 20 point move ends up netting only 5 or 6 points by buying at the RET as opposed to buying at the breakout level, but who cares, this is a highly probable 5 or 6 points. As I finish, I can see price forming a wedge/hinge that eventually breaks out the top. So if I had my trade set for a 2:1 profit:loss, it would have hit the profit target at 82 before hitting the loss target. My god, putting a trade on and walking away, or at the very least knowing that after the trade is on I can't touch it except to move the stop to BE would be a dream psychologically. FINALLY To those complaining that I post too much while others are making money (you know who you are), just don't fucking read. All the hours that people have spent typing up responses to help me has I'm sure helped others as well who are learning from my journey. So "posting while others are making money" is still benefiting a huge heap of us... even those who chuckle at me for all the posting I'm doing.