There is a key dynamic in this thread. It is to do with problem solving and so it interests me. It goes like this: "I set up detailed rules to manage my trading" or "All my rule making proved not good enough and so I trade according to my feel of the market". So are those similar alternatives or opposites? Much that goes on in ET threads in the search of success or better success is also along those lines: "I have few or no rules for my trading" or "I have a plan and rules which I need to follow". What is going on? The brain can obey complete rule based playing but there is a problem when the rules don't encompass all possible future outcomes. This leads to the alternative: "F**k this, I can do better playing according to my feel of the market". This will include what you've already learned about market patterns but also won't encompass all possible future outcomes and can lead back to what? Yes, a return to a rules based plan for trading. What is it that I am doing? I am a rules based player.
I dropped methods that took me years to develop in favor of simpler methods that took me less than one week. Now, I enter with the simple methods, and sometimes extend the trade when it coincides with the methods I learned in the beginning. Best of both worlds... very easy management for 90% of my trades and the occasional big runner.
I realized that I was a risk manager and that my job was to provide liquidity and assume risk. In exchange for providing that service, I would be compensated. If I did a poor job, I would not be compensated.
Master yourself, that's the last thing. Good post on doing that: http://traderx.blogspot.com/2011/06/vacation-post.html
It wasn't the last thing, but it's something that can give you a huge boost in returns and turn a marginally-unprofitable strategy profitable or a profitable strategy more profitable: Identifying "false positive" trade signals, where everything looks exactly like a trade that typically turns out to be a winner for you, but there's one thing wrong with it that you hadn't considered before. If that one thing is something that you can systematically identify and eliminate trade signals because of, it will keep you out of a lot of losing trades. I recently found something of this sort in my own method and was able to reduce the amount of points lost in losing trades by 40% this month, by avoiding 8 trades that would have been losers. I also avoided 3 winning trades, but that is a tradeoff I'm willing to make. The trick is to be able to identify these trades without messing up your regular strategy. For me, the variable was something I hadn't been tracking, but once I started to track it, I noticed that in these losing trades, that variable tended to have an elevated value, so I turned it into a filter.
Reduce over-trading. Not to open another position until ALL open positions are green. Green or out (and replaced).
================ Good points,P TT Havent stopped using leverage, but much , much more selective; also using less leverage usually results in more time /profit in top trending trade/investments . And using less leverage [or none] is more fun. But super selective leverage[not super leverage] is fun also. With no leverage, 7 weks of upternding GLD, gold is fun...; with leverage, 7 weeks of gold derivatives UPtrends is a good time to tighten up stops, even if if takes a trader out near all time hi. Bye