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In my opinion, you may want to focus less on the technical stuff and more on your relationship with losing. I think you might need less of a "technical manual" and more of "how to perform like a competitive athlete" kind of approach. Part of this is simply accepting the fact, in my experience, that your performance depends heavily on taking losses when they occur.
For S5 Trading clients, for example, I have taken live trade data for clients and gone through it to show what their results would have looked like had they NOT violated their risk plan or stop placement. The numbers change dramatically. Situations like you had yesterday create damage on many levels. The worst of it is what you said "that you haven't been successful at anything your whole life" (paraphrasing). That is serious emotional damage. It is one of the biggest factors in how differently high performers operate versus the rest. Even when times are tough, a high perform sticks to his plan and cuts his losses. Very hard to do that in trading because the results are easily quantifiable and are in real time.
If you looked at every trade from yesterday, you will find some very critical flaws in your execution, in my opinion. One of these may be the fact that you don't have a way to stop yourself from fading a trend on a trend day (I use the "3 stabs and your done" rule in my risk plan).
Your exercise in NOT taking losses today seems odd to me. I don't know the details, but this may be another way to reinforce the issue that is causing the losses. Not sure. More to come as we interact and I get feedback.....
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This was a simple exercise showing how not taking your regular, small loss, and "hoping" for a turnaround can prove deadly. Trying to reinforce THAT view.
Thank you for taking the time to offer a bit of advice. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
You're totally right. This will be my focus going forward. I saw on your website that you have a book that's required reading... "The Inner Athlete" ... I'll be purchasing that today. I imagine you would say that's a good first step...
As I read this, it's a bit painful to be labeled/consider myself as NOT a high performer. It's also tremendous fuel to become one.
Spot on again. In fact, the entries were more of "whim" trades than any actual setup I trade. I'm a bit different from your trading in the fact that I *typically* tend to go with the short term trend/flow, versus look for areas they may reverse (as far as I understand your trading) unless I define the structure as a range, like I did today, but even then as you can see from the trades, I wait for a bit of price action to confirm the shift in supply/demand.
So I say this to say... Once price showed real strength down out of the opening swing yesterday, my trading plan calls for trades in the short direction with the strength. The longs I took were absurd.
Doing it on your own just isn't the same as going on a 10-day retreat where you have a regimented day, strict schedule, and someone making sure you stick to it.
You are never in the wrong place... but sometimes you are in the right place looking at things in the wrong way.
Check out how these composite HVN's played out with today's PA...
Interesting. Too bad I didn't give them more weight today! I'm new to the whole VP concepts though, really just monitoring it at this point to see if something really resonates with me.
I continually have to force myself to spend more time on psychological/attitude/beliefs development. My natural way is to get involved in a spreadsheet, test out trade ideas, and analyze every entry/exit I've ever made.
It's hard, but I'm becoming aware of how much time I spend every day on that stuff, and how little time I spend on where I really need to be working (on my mind). I even noticed in my paper journal today that journal entries typically looked something like, "9:19AM - Long based on 5000vol range developing, price not able to breach OS low. Scaled. Added. Out" and then it's on to the next trade where a similar writeup is.
My plan is to start including OTHER MORE IMPORTANT things alongside that type of trade rationale. For starters, I'm going to begin including my risk plan/where I'm wrong and why. Honestly, as complicated as we'd like to make it, and as deeply psychologically screwed up as I may seem (ha), it may really come down to not having a concrete plan for exiting a trade when I'm wrong. This lack of a pre-planned stop type trading and the bad-judgement-on-the-fly-plan-making while in a trade kind of stuff has to stop. It may be THE biggest root cause of the risk problems that arise from time to time in my trading. Again, as mentioned yesterday, this is getting back to the basics/fundamentals of solid trading.
One other thing I want to start including in each trade log post in my paper journal is one statement. Not the same statement over and over again, but any statement that I feel like writing at the time. The statement/affirmation I'll be writing will have something to do with focusing on big picture goals and dreams, or optimism about my ability to execute a risk mgmt plan, or focusing on the value of my goals and deflating the value of bad habbits and their consequences, or thinking about the feeling that will come with success - the pride, satisfaction, and peace, or one of my core beliefs, or why I'm following a risk management plan rather than just how I'm doing it. All higher level things that will help not get bogged down in any moment, and keep me clear on my overall, bigger picture, mission at hand.