I've always been plagued by this intense inner conflict related to all the specifics that can be chosen when creating a trading plan. Indecision would probably sum it up best using one word.
In the beginning it started I guess as the search for the holy grail in terms of how to frame the market and determine an edge. Fibonacci levels? Keltner Channels? Market Profile? Maybe I should trade options? Swing trading is better. Wait, no, it's better to scalp. I mean, it is a lot easier to predict what the weather will be 5 minutes from now than what it will be next week. Doesn't that apply to trading too? Etc, etc.
It took me several years to get the point where I was fully committed to my particular way of determining an edge. But then, the indecision transferred to the mechanical vs. discretionary aspect of trading. My mind was always somewhere in between these two ideas:
"Trading is a performance sport, your true edge is you, and the dynamic nature of the markets make it impossible to apply strict mechanical criteria to it. Mechanical setups are nothing more than mental shortcuts (heuristics), but the real edge is your experience and intuition"
"No man, it's all about probability and sample size. I'm just like a casino, exploiting my edge over the large sample and not worrying about the individual wins and losses. You can't use intuition or discretion, that would just totally mess up your sample. Any trade outside of the mechanical criteria is just trading randomly"
The number of years that I spent stuck in my head on this particular debate alone is enough time for me to have instead chosen basically any other profession that exists, gone through all the schooling or training it requires, and even come out tenured in the end. But no, I chose to never give up the trading dream, and here I still am, around 23 years later. There have probably been just two times over those years where I told myself and others that I give up, and each time it probably took no longer than a week before I was back at it with renewed vigor. You never lose until you quit, right? And hell no was I going to go through so much struggle and sacrifice and not get some reward for it in the end.
For the last month or so, I've been seeing some consistency that I haven't really seen too often, and had started to feel like I was finally making the turn. But as the recent webinar guest Adam Grimes said, "The edges that exist are very small, and you can't make mistakes" And today I got triggered by a missed opportunity, went a little on TILT, and blew past my daily loss limit by 3x. I guess that's prompted me to start this journal, since I know from experience that when I have a day like today, there is a high risk that it will repeat tomorrow. I'm pretty sure my "revenge trading neural pathway" is highly myelinated compared to any pathway I might have for "disciplined trader".
Anyways, eliminating unnecessary mistakes is really what I'm after, and I'm hoping that connecting with other traders through this journal might somehow help me achieve that. Thanks for stopping by.