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So, a day of two halves - firstly a quiet range, then a break-out into a fast sell-off down to new 11-month lows.
I only made one trade in the first part of the day and technically it was correct but my read of the market bias was wrong.
The second trade was in the big sell-off, which was technically bad since I rushed the analysis and left out most of it despite my checklist.
The lesson learnt today is that I need to prepare ahead of the setups, otherwise I'm too slow if I try to go over my checklist in 15 seconds. That is a guaranteed way to do it badly or incorrectly.
I have to predict the setups, which is only difficult when I'm suffering analysis paralysis about what principle of future trend direction I should be working under. This happened for long periods during the quiet range trading today and by the time the market broke out and headed off south, I'd lost my focus and attention. So I need to work on maintaining that as well.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I'm going to keep track of my performance now in terms of trading skill by counting the number of mistakes I make in relation to the number of reasonably feasible trades in the trading session.
I've already started marking my trades in the trade log with an error index so this will synergise with the error count because I will work on both together to categorise my mistakes, making the trade log spreadsheet more useful once I have a mature set of error categories.
I'm not going to count all analysis mistakes as mistakes unless they are pretty crass, i.e. I have to feel that I could conceivably have got it right on another day. If I think I would never have made the right call in a particular situation, I won't count it as a mistake - the trade will just be a failed trade, not a mistake.
The first problem that I have with categorising the errors on the trades in a trade log spreadsheet is that the spreadsheet only allows me to log one error, when in fact I can make multiple errors. Love that smilie.
The other thing is obviously that I don't log the trades I missed, so that only gets recorded here in text format.
Today's trades:
took 2
avoidable errors 2
missed 10
Running out of time to categorise them - doh. Will have to do that tomorrow.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Not a great day but my laptop crashed for the first time ever and took all my trading notes with it, including the mark-ups I'd put on the chart, so nothing was saved except the record of the actual trades I made which were held by the broker.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
After a minor transgression I should have taken stock and reset my displine level back to normal. I noticed the breaking the rules 'damaged' my discipline and led to worse and more dangerous trading down the line.
I allowed myself to be hustled into an entry my last proper trade and took it badly, which would have been OK if I'd stood back for a moment and accepted what I'd done.
Later during the trade, I had exited half and wanted to re-enter on a pull-back, which would have been a valid setup, but not only did the pull-back not work out smoothly and I let myself be hustled into another trade, I accidentally hit buy instead of sell and stupidly, worse, after exiting the bad trade, thought that I could still get in on the trade - but I didn't do the analysis, I just entered.
So I need to stop myself and re-discipline myself after every slight mistake, otherwise it seems to snowball.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
This might be a good learning exercise, but you seem to be assigning meaning to every bar on the chart, when many have no meaning at all, just churning trades. In the past several weeks, I think the euro has not been trading technically at all, but rather has been moving on ECB bond buying, news of ECB bond buying, and Merkel/Sarkozy et al public statements.
I'm searching for meaning in every bar, that is true, constantly building up theories about the current price action and then dropping the theories as they prove useless.
But I don't go back and edit out the stuff that was wrong in my notes - it's just a record of what I was thinking as the price action developed. I assume that's what you're talking about.
I recognise to a certain extent that this behaviour - "assigning meaning to every bar" as you put it - is inefficient but I am still waiting to see whether I get better at it or whether it's just the route to insanity. I seem to be improving, but probably in other areas and not this one.
I can't agree with you about the Euro / USD being or not being 'technical'. From what I have read of your posts I think you're probably on a different planet in terms of what / why / how you trade compared to me, but let's just say I believe the Euro / USD is doing pretty much what it should do in terms of the trading strategy I'm using i.e. there's a good degree of interaction at S/R levels.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
2 trades, 3 missed trades, 5 errors and all opportunity costs not hard losses.
Worst mistake was missing the first 20 pip move because I wasn't paying attention at the point when I was aware I should be paying attention. I think I was writing a note complaining about something stupid.
Second worst mistake was an exit mistake, not moving my T1 stop up when it was more or less screaming at me to be moved - that cost 10 pips.
The other 3 were analysis mistakes seen with the benefit of hindsight.
I won't be able to trade tomorrow since I've travelling to Berlin and I'm not sure I'll be able to trade on Thursday in Berlin either, but Friday is definite, although it's probably going to be really quiet because of Christmas Eve. I need some longer trading days to test myself better. Hopefully after Christmas I'll be able to do some 6 hours sessions. The 4 hours I put in yesterday and today were useful but didn't give me the same level of learning experience I was getting last week.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Wasted yesterday trying to NinjaTrader to work over the mobile broadband USB stick I bought here in Berlin and ended up wasting my time, no thanks to NinjaTrader - which is unusual but happens I guess.
So I traded yesterday. As on Tuesday, it was a slow day and it really helped my trading, giving me less rope to hang myself with. Should have made 3 trades, maybe more, only managed 2 of them. Only one instance of outright bad trading, missing the second good trade yesterday. Hesitation and loss of focus combined. I decided to enter my previous trade into the log just as I should have been watching the next setup develop. I looked back at the screen to see it just in mid-setup and then I guess really it was too late, so it was more loss of focus (doing something other than watching the setup) more than hesitation, although if I was faster at getting a grip on the situation I could have got into the trade perhaps.
The first trade was almost a failure and I don't know how close I came to hitting the bail-out button - very close probably. Hopefully if it had failed I would have saved a few pips. As it was, I didn't need to.
Merry Christmas everyone.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Why do you use NT?
Is it because you trade from the charts or you need something in NT?
Why dont you just use a charting package. I use ProRealTime : Real Time Technical Analysis Software for charting.
It might help.