You must be a contender for the award of most posts without adding any value. Edit: aww, looks like the guy got butthurt and put me on ignore.
You wanna see someone go on tilt really fast... call out @Scataphagos for being an idiot and then watch the tears run down his face. AHAHAHAHAH, see... too funny!
Don't go FULL coding like Python or C, use a scripting language. It is much easier and closer to writing Macros in MS office or the like. They provide huge libraries of functions that you do NOT have to build yourself. TradeStation, Multi Charts, Ninja Trader, Sierra Charts and more all have scripting languages. Plus it will re plasticize your brain like learning Italian or French.
I love using trading slang but never came across the slang word "tilt". Thus, I needed to use google to look it up. 1. WHAT TILT IN TRADING IS? Tilt in trading is a situation when a trader acts in the state of a strong emotional agitation and either cannot or doesn’t want to control his actions, being completely in the grip of emotions. It is commonly believed that tilt is an active process in which a trader is forced to execute poorly thought-out or hasty trades. There is also a passive type of tilt when emotions keep a trader out of execution of any trade. In this article, we will speak about such tilt, which represents a complete absence of control over actions and, consequently, may lead to catastrophic effects. In order to understand tilt better, imagine a situation during trading when your internal dialogue sounds like this: “What? Again! I don’t believe it! Well, watch out!” After which, feeling rage or despair, you execute a poorly thought-out or hasty trade. Trading becomes extremely aggressive and the whole risk management circles down the drain. In case you haven’t faced such a situation, remember the most recent quarrel with a close person. The majority of people, at least once, said something, being enraged, which they actually didn’t mean and would prefer to eat their words, but they couldn’t control themselves being in a grip of strong emotions. 2. PROBLEMS, CAUSED BY TILT There is a probability of entering the state of tilt before the signs of a trading failure manifest themselves. It often happens that a trader initially makes profit, although he is already in an uncontrolled emotional state. In fact, this is even worse, because bad habits start to develop in this case. In some cases, strong emotional responses to specific market situations become the trader’s second nature. In financial terms, the negative tilt consequences could exert serious influence on the expected profitability of the strategy. It takes just a few reckless trades to significantly corrupt the trading statistics. Very often tilt pushes traders to a premature closure of profitable trades. Thus, the negative tilt effect only doubles when you take less profits from the market and leave there more losses. And this is, as you understand, not the best way to make living by trading. 3. TILT TRIGGERS There are a lot of triggers, after emergence of which arrives a high probability of emergence of the tilt state. Making a loss after the price reverses nearly reaching the aim could be a trigger. Sometimes it is very difficult to cope with such a situation, which may lead to deterioration of your emotional state. Also, you might have bought some instrument on a strong rally (as you thought) but the market suddenly reversed at the moment of your entry. Missing a series of potentially profitable trades and making a loss immediately after you entered the market could also be a potential tilt trigger. Regardless of which of the scenarios you experience, the probability of your entry into the tilt state completely depends on your sensitivity. 4. TILT SENSITIVITY There are a big number of reasons which increase the trader’s tilt sensitivity. For example, if you trade with a small capital, every individual trade will exert a big influence on your deposit. In this case, some loss-making trades could throw you into rage and finally cause the feeling of fear. If you experience a long period of losses or low trading results, the level of your emotional capital may turn out to be so low that any negative event would result in the loss of self-control. It is clear that alcohol or other matters that destroy brain cells, along with improper nutrition and sleep disorder and domestic stress, also may cause problems since the physical state of a trader plays a very important role in his sensitivity to tilt in trading. 5. TILT REASONS, CAUSED BY THE MARKET FACTORS And still, the reason for tilt emergence is not always in a trader himself. The forms of market movements also can exert a significant influence on him. A sudden closure of a trade by a stop-out at the moment of a sharp increase of volatility could cause the feeling of helplessness and ‘fight and flight’ reaction connected with adrenaline rush in a dangerous situation. Perhaps, one of the most serious dangers for a trader is the loss of ability to act rationally at the moments of sharp increase in market volatility. Increased market volatility and your erratic behaviour, caused by the news, often lead to the tilt and painful losses. 6. RECOVERY FROM TILT IN TRADING The best advice for those who experienced the tilt state (and it is a majority of traders) is that the watchful relation to your feelings and actions could become a key to avoidance of its consequences. If you were caught by tilt once, it is very difficult to get out of it, that is why identification of its signs and development of a mechanism of blocking its consequences could render you huge assistance. It could be a break from sitting in front of the computer, breathing exercises, short intensive physical exercise or setting a strict daily loss limit. However, truly speaking, it is better to try to avoid tilt at all. This assumes identification of your tilt sensitivity at a certain moment of time, identification of the trading scenario variant, which could serve as its trigger and your alertness in the event of the trigger activation and tracking emotional signs of the tilt state approach. It is much easier to avoid tilt, when you are ready, than to try to leave this state. We also recommend you to read the article about 14 emotional states of a trader. ---------- wrbtrader
The problem with discretionary vs automated trading systems is emotion. As humans, our emotions will affect our trading. I know I have made some mistakes when I reacted emotionally, to a trade instead, of leaving it alone. A lot of times, our trades will go against us, even on a temporary basis. You have to see the big picture always. If your analysis is still correct, why exit the position? Risk management takes care of losses. If you are not controlling your risk, you have no chance of coming out ahead. Losses are part of trading. Lots of small losses, I can easily live with. It is the large losses that ruin the bottom line and eat profits earned so far.
Cant speak for anyone else but I finally just got sick and tired of being on tilt when a trade moved against me and said fuck it,,placed my stop and if it gets hit it gets hit. Move on to the next trade.
Include in your trading plan, with each successive loss a step down in risk taken per trade. If you are not doing this you're not a trader, you're a gambler who lie's to themselves that they are a trader to justify your gambling addiction. The only way out is to accept this truth and embark on "identity-based change" vs "goal-based change" The book "Atomic Habits" gets into this aspect. Most likely, your gambling addiction is based upon childhood trauma. The twitter timeline "TheHolisticTherapist" has high signal-to-noise content to acknowledge and address this underlining issue. "Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.” — Ed Seykota
OP, not sure what platform you're on but Strategy Builder on NinjaTrader works great. I don't code but use excel & powerbi in the dayjob...was able to test and automate a portion of my trading in less than a week. If you go that route, search for NinjaTrader Paul posts on their forum regarding how to do basic math in the tool. I banged my head against a wall for a bit until I stumbled across his posts/videos.
Been there done that. Best thing I've done to change this is to automate my trading AND to just run on VPS and shut it off till the next session. Not watching the damn chart and PnL helps you a lot.