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If you plan on doing the TST combine at sometime it's been said time and again in almost every TST Journal, make sure you trade their T4 platform if you havent traded on CTS T4 before. Trade it for at least 7-10 days. I cant stress this enough. I thought I had the ins and outs of it but I got a rude awakening. Trading on OEC you get spoiled with simplicity.
Thanks @garyboy275 . In my studies of your thread and others, I've seen that mentioned a lot. I'll definitely do that.
-AT
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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Mission Plan: Sierra.2013.06.Charlie Theater of Operation: Echo Sierra Mike Three
Sitrep
Still really busy with my other work, so this post will be brief with no play by play or review. I worked with the new ideas I mentioned yesterday and got clearer about a few things.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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Mission Plan: Sierra.2013.06.Delta Theater of Operation: Echo Sierra Mike Three
Trades #319-321
AAR
Objective: Follow my mission plan and do the best I can with what I've learned so far.
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Outcome: 3 trades, 2 winners (one with 1 tick of negative slippage), +6 ticks for the day.
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Observations: Lately, in an attempt to modify my trading into a format resembling the way I think, from a "logical" perspective, I should be trading, I've struggled and flip-flopped from one "idea" to another with frustrating results.
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So yesterday afternoon I made the decision to, again, go back to my basic method in order to 1) have a structure to build from, and 2) see if it/I can/will still perform profitably. I'm putting my logical ideas of how I should be approaching my trading to the side for the time being and I'll see how things go.
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I'm a little rusty with my basic method so my first trade wasn't good, but I followed my basic setup plan and finished (before my FOMC day cut-off time of 10:30CT) with a profit.
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Following my plan today was so much less stressful, and better, than what I was attempting to do before.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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I'm very busy with work this weekend so this will be brief.
Although my weekly stats make it look like I'm doing (relatively) fine, there is an underlying problem that the numbers don't reflect.
The problem is that I still haven't developed a solid framework for my trading.
There's a reason I've been taking only a trade or two each day and calling it done.
The reason is that, by continuing to "practice" after I've called it done for the day, I've found that I seem to work myself into an unrecoverable hole every time.
This puts me in a position of not being confident about what I'm doing.
I still have some more ideas I'm working on though.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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The past several months have been mostly a theme of struggle for me with my trading. I've kept at it, but my efforts have felt mostly like grasping at straws.
At the beginning of this year I was looking at price action in a certain way, and while I wasn't clear about what I was doing, the basics of it were the way I knew I wanted to be trading.
But I was continually frustrated by the lack of an appropriate way to approach it. I don't mind working hard, and I love to learn, but I wasn't sure what to work at, and I wasn't sure what to work on learning.
As you probably already know, I'm a firm believer that attitude is really the determining factor in success or the lack of it. I've been studying positive thinking and its myriad variations since I was in my late teens, so I understand a lot about it. But my lack of success in applying it in my life was an area of extreme frustration for me. Although I did a lot of studying and I always did the exercises - meditations, writing, visualization, etc. - I still couldn't seem to achieve any noticeable changes in my life. With everything I knew about it, I should have been wildly successful with it.
Over (a lot of) time I have come to realize that my "problem" wasn't in understanding the concepts or doing the "work." What I came to realize is that the "problem" was that I wasn't living it. In other words, even though I was doing the exercises, meditations, etc., they made up a very small part of my day. And then I would spend the rest of my waking hours worrying, being frustrated, being aggravated, being unhappy with my circumstances, etc.
It became clearer and clearer to me that the thoughts I spent the most time thinking were very similar to the circumstances that I was actually experiencing.
Then last October I decided to read a book that I already knew about but had decided months earlier was one I didn't need to read. As soon as I finished the first "lesson," I knew it was the key that would help me begin to live what I had already learned.
Within 3 weeks of starting it, I was having surprising things happening to me. I did it for a few more months and continued to have improvements in my life, but apparently they weren't dramatic enough for me to keep it up, so I slacked off from it quite a bit.
Things stagnated for me, my business slowed down to almost nothing, and I was in a very worrisome place. This was a little after the beginning of the year and I was really trying hard to get a handle on my trading. I was having some success with my "training," but other than teaching myself to be consistent, I wasn't really making any other headway.
Fast forward to the beginning of May. I made a post about my commitment to change my habits of thinking for the whole month and I did it. In another post, at the beginning of June, I talked about how my business had increased exponentially during May, without any extra effort on my part.
I also said that I intended to do basically the same thing for the month of June, and again, I have. This month my business has continued the pace it started in May, which is a nice financial relief.
Not only has my business situation improved over the course of both months, but my life in general has improved.
But something far more profound has just happened within this last week of June. I inadvertently (which is the way things seem to happen to me when I'm maintaining this attitude) discovered some information about a way of looking at price that brought almost immediate clarity to what I had been trying to do with my trading. It was like a light on a dimmer switch - as soon as I began to learn about it, the light came on but it was dim. Then as I read and studied, the light became brighter and brighter, and very quickly I had a clarity about how to proceed with my trading that I haven't had before.
It will take time, study and work, but now I know what to spend my time on. I know what to study. I know what to work on.
And I firmly believe that this is a result of my deliberate work in changing my habits of thought - in changing my attitude.
I don't want to start a discussion about all of the books, methods and concepts out there, because different things work for different people. But for anyone interested, the book I'm referring to that has been "the one" for me is [I]The Magic[/I] by Rhonda Byrne.
I've recommended it to family members and others who have all reported significant positive results in their lives. I also spend a lot of time listening to the audiobook [I]The Power[/I] (by Rhonda Byrne), and skimming through my collection of books by Abraham-Hicks, but this book is the first thing I've tried that has made a nearly immediate, and definitely noticeable, difference in my life when I use it.
I'm beginning to think that trading is really not all that different from any other endeavor. I believe that success in anything (work, finances, relationships, health) boils down to your habitual attitudes about it...and about life in general.
And this attitude of gratitude that I've been cultivating lately is shaping up to be a game-changer for me.
"Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard." - Robert Pirsig
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Bingo brother. An attitude of gratitude, a humbleness of spirit and putting other people in your life (both close and casual) first. It's not about you, is it? In trading or anything else.