To the contrary, I've been amazed over the past 4 years by how few people want to help/freely exchange advice on trading once there's no money involved.
I always remind myself that trading is not about making money rather about controlling your losses. Think about it. When you are making profits, whether you take them to quickly or not, this is a good problem to have. On the other side the losses are really what harms your account so basically you only need to control them, thus loosing is part of the game. Trading=Risk Management (Including Losses)
True. In fact, there are still some traders who couldn't even handle their losses (lack of risk management). Still never considering that losses is part of their trading career and this is the most dangerous mindset ever..
I haven't found that to be so. BUT my experience is limited - I suppose I'm very fortunate in that case.
Doesn't matter, they are still independent of each other for the most part. Your plan tells you what and when you are going to trade, max loss for the day, which strategies you are going to employe, how much capital to risk on each trade, etc. Your strategy tells you exactly what the conditions are for buy or sell and what stop loss you'll incorporate, if any.
You seem to want to talk or argue but not follow any of the advice some master traders have been giving you. You have not implemented any advice and come back to tell us if it has helped. I will give you some free advice to try that is easy to implement and will not continue on this thread if you have not posted examples of you following the advice. 1) As NoDoji stated using most modern charting software, trade management can be mostly automated. So for example you see the price where you want to get in. Let's say it is a short trade. You either place a sell stop at the price if the market is coming down, or a sell limit if the market is coming. The software can then do the rest based on your trading plan of managing the trade till you are profitable or stopped out. Then you can leave the room and for example take a walk and come back later to see if your trade worked out. Later on when you gain more confidence in your system, you should try to stay in the room for the entire trade so you can watch for more trades unless for example these patterns occur say only once daily. 2) As noted by some others you create a trade journal for example in an spreadsheet for every trade. In the trade, you can have columns like day, reason for trade, win/loss, summary. This will help you determine what you are doing right or wrong going forward. Also, you need a trading plan in for example some type of word document that explains to you what are the characteristics of each trade setup that you are looking for, and for example, are you setting a total amount that you are willing to lose for day before stopping. This could also be the issue, since if you are able to become disciplined enough to not go over your stop loss amount for the day, then you will know that you will not blow your trade account up by taking losing trades during the day which will give you confidence to pull the trigger. 3) Before you take any trade, you need to tell yourself that you accept that the trade may turn into a loss and that your are aright with that. You need to have faith that your system works and belief that you can execute your strategy. After a loss occurs, you need to determine that your emotional state has not changed to for example one of anger where you will then start to over trade or revenge trade to make back money from the loss without waiting patiently for a real trading setup. The same is true for a winning trade. If for example, you don't just trade 1 losing trade and 1 winning trade per day, after a winning trade you can't be afraid to place a 2nd trade based on your trade setup in fear that the profit you made today will be taken by the next trade if it turns into a losing trade. This can actually be harder to accept since you were 1st up for the day then just going to BE makes you angry and you revenge trade into multiple losing trades. 4) Also most modern charting packages can generate reports for you which includes your win % to see if you really have an edge and if you are able to execute your trading plan on the bleeding right corner of the screen. This can also be correlated to hopefully what you expected to see and if it is good can give you more confidence in your trading abilities. I have included mine for this week.