Rubbish, the real edge is finding what the institutions do and following them moving weak retail money to stronger hands. Risk management just means death by a thousand cuts rather than the nuclear option, the closer you get to and the longer you last a catastrophic event the more you should learn before inverting.
Depends what your definition of risk management is. It doesnt necessarily mean exiting quickly when the market goes against you.
I agree. As I have posted before, part of risk management is proper trade allocation toward ideas that have positive expectancy with a risk/reward value that fits your business. I would say that I would rank EDGE then RISK MANAGEMENT as the two most important things to focus on, but I would not describe risk management as an edge, but a requirement to be successful.
Risk Management is important, but in a negative way. If you disregard it, chances are you're gonna fuck it up bigtime sooner or later, regardless how much edge you think you have. Edge is that which might put the odds slightly in your favour over time. Real leverage is becoming like Soros and you decide wether the markets should go up or down. Unless your leverage comes from Soros, at which point you just get margin calls and pink slips
There is no "thought process for a successful trade". The thought process is the same whether the trade wins or fails. You won't know about success except in hindsight... which of course is useless. View the chart... see the play, make the play... with the expectation of success. If not, small loss. Rinse and repeat. That's it. K.I.S.S.
As years go by in my trading career, I trade less and less, but with larger capital per each trade. Every night, I spend an hour or two to go through many charts from big pictures to smaller ones so I can analyze the market. I write down my thoughts on a notebook where I separate them into a group of pros and cons so I can identify risks v.s. rewards level. Then, during intraday trading hours, I don't try to make a trade happen (this is very important), I let a trade coming to me just like in a fish game where I bait for a big fish patiently. Once, my trading system gets triggered and a trade is entered, I'll observe to see how my trading system behaves to market movement so that either a) I take profits off the table asap or b) I cut loss if certain rules are violated. Some of you might wonder why do I bother do so much homework for each trade? Well, I trade full-time, not as a day trader, for living and trade weekly call/put options. Those who trade options know very well that you will lose extremely quick if market goes against your trade and your trade will expire mostly worthless upon expiration date. Why bother to trade those risky stuff? Well, it's about make great profit in a quick way. Take a look at below screen shot of my last trade, where I made ~70% return per trade in a matter of a day to two. This is how a successful trader using 6-figure capital per trade to make 5-figure return within a few days. Imho, this is how successful traders trade because they don't make random, careless and emotional decisions.
This type of "off table" homework is what I am keen to be doing, although being new to trading I need to find out exactly what homework I should be doing and what i shouldn't. The YouTube gurus havent explain that part in enough depth for me yet :/
Such type of homework has to be done by yourself over those years of trading through trial and error because different type of traders have different trading styles.