I agree that ones bread and butter may not work for another. I did a favor for my brother and wrote out one of my trading plans to the key. Position sizing, Finding candidates, Stop losses, etc..... He could'nt even trade it for 3-4 trades before he went back to shooting from the hip and I clearly showed him a large sample of real-time trades I had charted out in excel that showed a 30-40% gain in one year with less then 5% drawdown. He's just a new trader and he is going to have to learn the hard way. He has absolutely no concept of the position sizing and money mangement aspect. IMO most traders have to get burned real nice before their ego shrinks. I was the same way
The categorical method that has always had the greatest utility form me is the P, V relationship. Strangely, I was able to understand its characterization best by default. What occurred was this breakthrough. By necessity in the late 50's all charts were made by hand using EOD data. Attached is the left half of a chart I printed from an inked mechanical drawing in the 50's. You can see it is a reprint of a reprint of a reprint. The other half makes an 11 by 17 that is six months of EOD's. 1/8's are long gone and now there are PC's web sites, software and printers, etc. The simple fact that plotting volume on a scale took mental time as the number of charts increased in my universe increased, led me to use the grid to simplly write the volume to three significant figuresinstead of making graphical bar. At this point, I simply recognized that when volume changed by an order of magnitude, then the price would begin to move with certainty. The P,V relationship was going from one half the Boolean expression to the other half. So as you say what I do is nominal and just an inherent thing. And you see it does come from a utilitarian type episode in my life. The equally interesting and utilitarian aspect of the above is what happened to my brain and particularly in my mind. The sheer repetition of years of hand making charts and their annotations until the modern era of the computer arrived, caused permanent changes in my ability to process data faster than the market can deliver it to me in any form to date. Today there is an inherent very significant downside for new traders (under 10 years). The Sullivan principle, I believe it is called. It is the fact that technology changes in nature every 18 months (and may be compressing even more frequently). New traders are not given the opportunity to get grounded before their basis of operating is gone and another replaces it. Since I am well grounded, it turns out, I just go with the flow and actually reinforce what you refer to as my arsenal. I will give you the second utility that I enjoy as primal. It is very important and I reinforced it from the get go. I did not ever pay "tuition". That is, the markets were so forgiving, etc. in the 50's and after, that I was making more than 10% a month from the get go using only round lots. My primal reinforcement was that I took out all my original capital and usually half my profits as a standard routine. This means starting with 300 trading dollars in 1957, that I bought for cash, from the market profits, in Kopenhagen a new mercedes sports car in 1960. I traded it for a used 300SL gull wing two years later. This utilitarian method of removing all initial capital and continuing to remove profits as capital gets larger is very very far away from ever paying tuition. 1. Knowing the P, V relation and the significance of change in the relationship. 2. Never trading in a situation where I could lose money. (To be clear I am saying I early on took all my investment capital back out of the market and have only, all my life, traded on profits). After this primal level come a lot of other utilitarian things like those you mention from your personal experience. For me, their common thread is, mostly, that I invented them for my personal use rather than acquired them from other sources. Big is running this thread along the lines of focussing on these kinds of things that the contributors here have to offer. Your comment and query add to this endeavor of his.
so i said to SELF; SELF you are an obedient perfect servant, I want you to make me a better trader. And after repeating it a few hundred times, I see mySELF improved a lot.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quote from bighog: ... I said to self: Self, you are doing something terribly wrong, either find out what is wrong or else throw in the towel and marry for money..... .. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- so i said to SELF; SELF you are an obedient perfect servant, I want you to make me a better trader. And after repeating it a few hundred times, I see mySELF improved a lot. The three things mentioned here are what I call "drills". All drills work exponentially and not just linearly. By repeating the same thing over and over and over again, the parallel paths built in your mind form a bundle. subconsciously this bundle is tightened and where some threads comeclose and maybe touch, an aditional shortcut is created for ease of future usage. The third thing mentioned loses any utility after a couple of times because you are richer than most women you would find it possible to meet. Switch to intellegence and experience at that point.
a]Strong ,smooth trends when possible, more NYSE, some NasdaQQQ; pick some apples early, some in season,try to avoid knocking over apple cart. z] Vary position size; and along with that , things learned from derivative traders[sloppy trends/not smooth trends] some of which applies to stocks.
So far nobody has been specific, so let's break the silence. The Holy Grail is obviously the Bollinger bands. Some people like to call it Keltner channel, but it is really the same thing. Thank you Mr. Bollinger, thank you, thank you!