Follow their rules??? Everyday I come into this office of mine with the best intentions of following my rules only to throw them out the window as the day progresses. My rules clearly state: Only take a long after a higher high and lower high. Yet today I had 3 trades all from the long side in the ES.. I know more about trading now than I ever have before but seem to be losing money faster than ever.. Other than seek psychological help which I really can't afford at this time I don't know what to do... and those of you who know me know this isn't the first time I've posted this pathetic bullshit
well, if you don't learn STRICT discipline... soon enuf you'll end up in one of the many "goodbye ET" threads: http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=48046
All you need is this! http://www.forexlite.com/forexlite_...n K - Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom.pdf I am dead serious! Read it and take it to the heart! You'll improve your trading 1000% Its free too.
Discipline = performance But do you really have any? If you know more about trading than ever then you can only expect to lose even more in the future as you learn even more about trading. That tells you that you don't need to study trading but something else. YOURSELF. Your problem is not about trading, it's your lack of understanding yourself and thinking that you do understand yourself and control your thoughts. You don't. YOU DON"T KNOW YOURSELF. You just think you do. I could be kinder about this and use we and us instead of you but you need a good kick in the ass to get on the road to honest self discovery and assessment. What comes over you when you make those bad moves in the face of no proper signals? Bias, how can it go down further, anxiety, I better get in now to get all the move that my bias says has to be coming. You can never know what's going to happen but the mind has to know, loves to know, it's functioned that way all your life, how else can we have faith the ground won't dissapear from under our feet in the next step? Only thru knowing. All you can ever know with certianty in the mkts is the signal, you have to calm yourself and remind yourself what it is your actually looking for , what must you visually percieve before the action is taken, not what are you hallucinating is going to happen. It's hard to retrain yourself, those behavioral synapses have worn deep grooves and you've never questioned their operational correctness. Become very aware of your feelings when you think you should enter a trade and question them. You have some work to do on not coloring reality with your desire. My tag line use to be "Don't feed the monkees", alas no more taglines. The monkees I was talking about are the ones in your head, we all have them and they're always hungry, little bastids.
Choad, that is kinda rough and one of the reasons why folks afraid to ask questions on ET. You have no idea why that person is quitting...and then to insult him and the person asking a question!?! RS
Well...dang...I certainly didn't mean it to be insulting The comment was on the order of "tough love". Trading is a tuff and unforgiving biz. I just know this from experience. Damn near every time I didn't follow my discipline, I got smacked down. Do that enough and you lose too much trading cap and have to quit. Good trading and good luck to all!
discipline isn't learned from a book or forum... it's acquired through consistent practice. Follow your rules one trade, one day, one month, one year, etc at a time. In time discipline becomes a habit. You either follow your rules or you don't. That simple. If you can't follow your rules then I must say Flashboy, I don't think you are serious about trading. If you are genuinely serious, then you will do whatever it takes to follow your rules. If that means sitting on your hands to wait for proper entry then so be it. As Banjo suggested, I don't think learning more about trading will be of any use to you. Learn more about yourself. The more I learn about trading the more my knowledge contradicts with my current system. I still have the discipline to follow my rules cos my ass aint going back to the military.
Why do you break this rule? Seriously....why do you break any of your rules. If you tell us why you break you're rules, it'll be easy to help with the problem. Of course, honestly answering the 'why' question will probably be enough to solve it. If you are brave enough to answer it honestly. "If you cannot conquer thyself, you will be conquered by thyself"