What I Learned My First Year Trading

Before all else, erase the words “right” and “wrong” from your belief system.

Master “support” and “resistance”.

A price cannot be too high or too low.

Honor thy stops.

“Every big loss was a small loss once.”

If in doubt, get out.

Once in a trade, place a stop at the price that invalidates your original signal for putting on the trade.

If you place a really wide stop at a ridiculous price that could not possibly be reached, prepare to lose that amount of money.

Finding yourself checking the Yahoo message boards when holding a losing trade is one of the strongest exit signals available.

 

I would add a few more

-Use money monagement
-You can only blame youself 100% for failure
-sell in may go away
-undercapitalized trading will quadruple+++ your chance of failure
-common sense trading is advised, you need to ackowledge every system has weaknesses and know ways to minimise weaknesses

 

Isn't one always in doubt? Otherwise he wouldn't be using stops.

 

good thread

 

and most gains were once small losses so this statement is meaningless.

 

All statements are meaningless because their meaning is limited by individual judgment.

 

A small loss is not the problem, realized or unrealized.

 

There is no way one can know real-time whether small loss becomes a big loss or big gain.

 

Thats my point. If you exit on every small loss to avoid larger losses you're never going to have any gains.

 

What I have learnt also, is that there is a difference between knowledge and application. There are lessons that have to be internalized....we learn alot more from our poor trades....as long as we don't keep repeating them