Do you commit any of the 7 Deadly Trading Sins? 1) Too Much Size 2) Lifting Stops 3) Chasing 4) Jumping the Gun/Overtrading 5) Adding to Losers 6) Counter-Trend 7) Revenge Trading -Courtesy of Slapshot from another thread I've read a lot of the books about day/swing/short-term trading. A lot of it is repetitive. A lot of it tells you longwindedly what Slapshot summorized so proficiently for us above. I've had many mentors and training, including the fortunate experience of having met Leo Melamid himself on several occasions. I know this is going to sound wacky, but, after 20 years I find the ability to trade is a constant struggle from within. I have no system. I don't believe that a signal line or momentum swing is all I need to make a decision. Gut alone is not it either. Taking in all of the news/indcators/feel/flow/trend etc... and sucking it up and quickly admitting when I'm wrong are the reasons for my success. I have a (very) similiar set of rules to slapshots that I review daily. I go over my trading day at the end with a chart and where I entered and exited and can almost always point to one of my rules that was broken for bad trades. Money management, diligence (adherence to rules), pressing when I'm up and not down, going against common opinion (if possible without violating rules) are what I focus on.
Tide, The one that cracked me up was one day I'm working on some system, who knows what it was, probably fading a Bollinger Band when Rsi was falling or something. And I am really working hard on figuring this system out. Then the market ticks up or down and I just without a thought hit the buy button and go on about my work and a few minutes later exit for a profit. And the whole time I am sitting there frustrated trying to figure out a system for making money.
I don't know if anybody mentioned it yet, but this is a great book loaded with theory, strategy, and psychology, and written by a truly great trader who never blew up and traded all kinds of markets. TRADER VIC - METHODS OF A WALL STREET MASTER BY VICTOR SPERANDEO He condenses everything down to basics and insists that fundamentals combined with psychology are what matter. I think he is right.
Profitseer, Funny is right. One of the first guys I sat with in the mid-eighties used to be full of all the old Wall Street cliches. I always joked about them in later years repeating them to trainees with the purpose of being more annoying than helpful: Why do markets go up? - "more buyers then sellers". Trend is your friend. When in doubt - get out. etc... The one that was most often repeated by this one trader still haunts me when I miss an oppurtunity that I SAW coming. It was "got a hunch, bet a bunch!" After searching for a system for trading for so many years like you said, I realized that it was a series of 'diagnostic' market indicators I watch that somehow mesh in my brain and tell me the most logical direction of the market in the near future. Thats my 'system' I guess! Don't get me wrong, I don't wing it - I am a big Fibonacci fan, and rely heavily on trendlines and support/resistance in addition to watching news.
Trading with DinaPoli Levels by Joe DinaPoli I use his method for applying Fibonacci techniques in my trading. He also has some pretty good Directional indicators based on price action. Though it was a bit expensive ($139 at www.tfnn.com), I found it to be worth the money.
ah and you are a Tom Obrien fan as well since you link to his site. I listen to him several times a week, even though I disagree with his politics.
Market Wizards and The New Market Wizards by Jack Schwager is full of a lot of useful information by many great traders! Also Trader Vic, Methods of a Wall St. Master by Victor Sperandeo is great book to read and reread. And lastly, LongTerm Secrets to Short Term Trading by Larry Williams, along with many other of his books are very usefull. Remember there is no holy grail in trading! Keep it simple! Keep your bets small, follow the trend, use stops, and wait patiently for your account to compound! good luck
No wonder you guys are confused! I am sure there are many good books among those mentioned, but you obviously confuse yourselves by reading too much. There is no empirical solution to this business and every book is someone's opinion that may work for him (most likely not, otherwise he wouldn't take time out to write this stuff) and is nothing more than a spin on some aspect of trading in general. There must be a lot of highly educated people among you at this board as evidenced by the typical desire to study, study and study a problem to death and never really pull the trigger. Give me a practical person with half your intelligence who is a hard-working self-starter and you have a winner. There is no substitute for practical experience.
What nonsense. The more I have read, learned, and studied over the years -whether it be Gann, Drummond, Gartley, Hurst, Merrill, Schabacker, Sperandeo, Dorsey, Dunnigan, Prechter, Tharp - the better the trading. Immersion works. PTR