It is obvious you are a not a trader. No matter how good your edge is if you just get out of a multiple year relationship with a woman you were extremely in love with because you found out the bitch was cheating on you, if someone in your close family is very sick from cancer, if your strategy is having an off week, if you are tired one morning and it makes you slow so that you miss your out and start the day down your daily target, in all those cases you won't have the same mindset on the next trade as you did before the problems were triggered. As long as you are human you will feel emotions while trading and no trader can keep his emotions from affecting his decision making 100% of the time because it is impossible to be aware of every single trigger in that will make you view the markets from a distorted perspective. Since no one has experienced every possibility we all can be struck or ticked off by something we have never experienced before. When someone undergoes a drastically unique emotional experience for the first time no matter how calm and cool he was in other situations because what he experiences is new and frightening he will be susceptible to errors. The easier and more mechanical the edge the easier the discipline is - to a certain extent at least.
You dont need edge. All you need is prayer. God will make you money. Prove im wrong. Ask Jem. He is right, and the top 1% of scientists in the world are wrong.
mental dont exist anymore, it is a tale from ancient times when traders made their decisions manually as the market action evolved. nowadays, most of the professional community relies on some sort of ats to run the operation. i believe around 90% of the volume in the eurex and globex is computer based. thus, trading is becoming an emotionless activity that is solely based on code supremacy, aka binary edge. also, there is no static edge anymore. the dynamics of competition fueled by hoards of brain and computer power alters the rules of the game on a constant basis. sustaining an edge on the long haul in such environment is increasingly difficult and it is totally based on survival of fittest (fittest code, that is).
How about losers who not only tout, but market their edge. Recently, TraderZones aka rcanfiel aka Ross had an epiphany in an attempt to reload his blown out account. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=128386
Good points Jon, Most people would rather focus on improving easily quantifiable elements of their strategy or money management rather than delving into their messy psychological hangups. I can think of a lot of traders who try different time frames, indicators, P/L multiples etc etc. Can't think of many who are working on their emotional/psychological issues.
LOL, I know quite a few traders who enter a trade that literally allows them to scoop up 100s and, due to their mental hangups, end up getting out with a tiny profit or even a loss because they don't have the mental discipline to actually stick with said trading edge.
no. capital flows to those with edges. many many wealthy people have lost their fortunes in the market. capital isnt edge. HLJ