Sitting on my hands while in a trade. I have a bad habit to watch my trades tick by tick and impulse exit if I see bars retrace.
Read these Hall of Fame Threads, they're right there on the left of your screen: http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=165170 http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=25425
I have always been profitable. So my response below is more about effectiveness and efficiency of taking the full offer of the market. The one thing was: using the leading variable (the independent variable) of Price (the dependent variable) as the signal generator. PA trading uses the lagging market variable, the dependent variable for trading. By using the leading variable, my trades are "pushed" by those who later trade using the dependent variable. The SEC name for my trading profile is "insider trader" the SEC says.
A hardened psychological energy to follow a simple method. It takes a strong will to drill down to the basics and believe in them. Without a belief, there is no ending of the whole process.
It wasn't one thing, it was two. Ironically, Jack and bighog each shared one of the two pieces in this thread. -river
For me it was lowering my expectations. In the beginning I heard that you should "cut your losses and let your profits run" so I tried to go for big long tail wins all the time. But in reality very few trades work out like that and I ended up recording too many losses. Then I lowered my take profit targets so that each time there was a high probability that it would exit the trade with a profit. If I believe there were still legs in the trade I can always re-enter it after there was some profit taking or a retracement.
Wow that's powerful.. People always preach cut losers short and let winners run but like you said it's very hard to do in reality.. You will have Too many losers in a row because you are always trying to go for the home run ..