and I would disagree. The edge and The plan are entirely different things. A plan is something people are so eager to share on message boards... An edge is something you keep very close to your vest.
A thoroughly-tested and consistently-profitable trading plan IS the edge. Whether or not one shares it is irrelevant.
fxwannaB I think it’s great you pointed out “you can go broke” doing most of the things I said. Also you referenced the best book my avatar wrote, which is pretty solid. “A plan is something people are so eager to share on message boards... An edge is something you keep very close to your vest.“ 1) Of course 2) I think a lot of people want trading to be like in a book. Buy at X. Stop at X - Y. Profit at X + Z. Enter and wait. It’s not just where it goes but how it goes there, plus experience and expectations. If I enter cuz I expect to see a fairly specific reaction relatively quickly and I don’t, that may already be a reason to cut it at close to even. And there are a lot of variations that happen from there, quickly, which is why it would be extraordinarily difficult to post “edge” in a forum post. At some point I think everything reminds you of trading. I am far from the first guy to equate it to fighting. I am far from the first pansy-assed upper middle class white guy to equate it to fights he will never come anywhere close to being in. “These experiences gave me new respect for all the Tae Kwon Do patterns Timmy taught me. Initially, I saw them as contrived preparation for a wholly spontaneous phenomenon. But fights, just like everything else, are all made up of the same stuff, only the combinations are different. There are a finite number of ways a person can hurt you, and after you’ve been hurt in all those ways enough times over — barring death or paralysis — you learn the forms and start to do your own hurting. In any athletic science, though, there are the certain few who transcend the inherent structures of the game — your Michael Jordan, your Pele, and so on all the way back to Alcibiades.” I mean, every word of that sounds like trading to me. I just think it’s a mentality new traders don’t want to deal with. Is it that big a stretch? Would I sign up for some kind of martial arts and think through reading a few books and wanting it real bad I’d be able to beat people who have been actually participating in matches for years? No, I’d need to get get my fucking ass kicked a bunch and do a bunch of boring practice drills before maybe having a prayer. So my post was really well-intentioned. I can’t tell you exactly what to do but if you’re new, stop trying to think about how to beat Mike Tyson. Start trying to learn how to get your defenses up against average, unglamorous contenders. If you already knew that then yep, it’s a waste of words. I read these forums and I see new traders — not everyone knows that kind of humility is a good first step.
Viewing trading as a fight or a battle can be as damaging as trading without a plan, and trading without a plan is usually the genesis for that sort of view, just as being dropped into a forest without any survival skills prompts one to view the forest as hostile. But the forest just is. The market is not sentient. It is not out to get you. The purpose of the market is to facilitate trade. That's all. If one has no idea how markets work or why price goes up and down, he is far more likely to blame his struggles on unseen, hostile forces than to accept the responsibility himself. You make some good points in your posts, but the attitude that the market is a battleground filled with foes that must be beaten is eventually self-defeating. It's just a market place, nothing more.
The idea is what's thoroughly tested. The execution, if done according to the plan, is the consistently profitable part. If trades are not executed according to the plan, there's no point in having it.
You sound like an old-school point and click day trader who relies on gut-feel and skills acquired after thousands of hours of screen time...am i close ? I tried that route for a long time, it never worked for me.