You do not remember your losses in demo, is that why you claim no losses in an earlier post? If you lost money in demo, that money won't be unlost in the real account. The whole point of backtesting and demo is to learn from the experiments in order to improve trading rules. Such a creative process require a bit of digging heels in the ground and reassessing what one is doing, and in trading to do so at every available opportunity. Wisdom, however great it may benefit your life in general, won't help you with the technicalities of trade analysis and execution. This is because wisdom and current knowledge is dead information, while trading is always fresh information that need to be processed and integrated. So if you really want to improve, lay down your shield and sword, and start plowing fertile ground.
i have solved my problem i made 3-4 good trades where i managed it properly. talking to you made me think. the problem was i was seeing the market correctly but i was acting early before other traders saw it ie before the market gave some sort of confirmation. i used enter early thinking the market would run and get stopped out. now if the market runs,i don't ! I sit and the bitch of a market comes back to me wagging her tail. we are our worst enemy. Thanks mate for your help
i have solved my problem i made 3-4 good trades where i managed it properly. talking to you made me think. the problem was i was seeing the market correctly but i was acting early before other traders saw it ie before the market gave some sort of confirmation. i used enter early thinking the market would run and get stopped out. now if the market runs,i don't ! I sit and the bitch of a market comes back to me wagging her tail. we are our worst enemy. Thanks mate for your help
The hardest thing that I find with trading is patience. Day trading is fairly boring. Most of the time I am sitting, watching the screen, waiting for my back-tested set up to appear. I can usually take the trades that come along, and keep strictly to my entry, stop loss, and exit. The problem for me comes when a set up does not appear for a long while. Then I sometimes find myself trying to create a trade out of price action that is "nearly there". If I can master doing nothing, when there is nothing to be done, then I will rule the universe.
IMO the only point to demo is to get a feel for how the software you are using works and how to execute orders and set limits and such. Demo trading has ZERO affect on live trades. ZERO. I can turn 10k to a 100k easily on a demo account. Now try to do it in live trades and take the 90k from other traders... good luck. I hate when people think “practicing” on a demo account is going to improve their trading skills. It’s laughable.
Amen yes watching the spikes and thinking if could catch only one of those i would make ten times as much, and then attempting to do just that ,is the beginning of the end. that is why i keep posting here while i wait for my trade. once it comes we wait for it to finish ET is a godsend for traders.
So you use darts? After much time, and seeing my partner be able to program my concepts, I now have to disagree. I have someone I am mentoring, he was a programmer first and learning to trade, he wanted to test out first what I was teaching him, and this never works IMO. You have to learn to trade manually first to get a feel of charting and all the many nuances, and be able to "live" within you the concepts of "trade", it is either too expensive or discounted, but neither means time to reverse. Memorizing the stats of not only patterns, but patterns depending upon a host of different patterns around it and of course definition of trend, whether complex or simple-has to be uniform. We all "trade" or live every second of our life, trading is making choices based on our pasts that offer highest percentages of success. People should be very good at this since we take money for goods daily, but people are sheep and good prices of hat you see are stationary, most people don't like change and that is what the marketplace is, constant change. People mostly fail at trading cause they are horrible at adapting to change and can't read charts whether they have indicators or just price bars.IMHO I believe it is best to learn charting without indicators on them first, and when you have developed honest stats, you have earned a Bachelor's degree in charting, if you want to use indicators is like going for a Master's degree in charting, but people always do like ass backwards, indicators are to help make decisions, but those entering trading too often go what is pretty or what they think is understandable. And the more you study people, more you understand why people fail at business and business of trading. I use to think this too for the longest time, all the very good traders who are Wizards, made it before 2000 for most part. But after getting into automation, far easier now cause I can't watch 25,000 different stocks, now it is not running out of choices for stocks to trade, running out of money and having enough cash for just in case requirements to quickly hedge and having enough margin for futures or cash for options, never good to be playing on the edge of having to count your loose change. "Dog" in America often time means friend, but in content can mean not doing well. Hypnosis in 1991 I did several times as my way of thinking all my life has been wrong as I have a label given few months ago called Aspergers. I still go 2-3 times a year for Hypnosis to help in areas that require memory and other areas of my life I may find weak. I don't believe in Psychiatrists if they can't experience my problems, and I don't believe the brain will change if you don't believe in it, whereas I believe in hypnosis.
===Why is trading so difficult?=== if by trading u mean trading for a living using your own money , well because unlike many other occupation where mediocrity thrives, here its impossible it is possible to be an average doctor, an average lawyer, an average engineer, even average an institutional trader and make money in our business there is no average, its all or nothing !
Because there are so many different opinions it is not clear what works. So if everybody would have the same opinion, it would be clear what to do to trade well. But as everybody would do the same, trading would be more difficult I think... as nobody would like to be the counterparty.