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I have come to the conclusion that having a secondary income and being accountable to someone that regularly makes money from trading is a prerequisite to being a successful trader. I mean how much better you would be as a golfer if you had Tiger Woods as your daily coach, or if you had Lionel Messi as your coach if you were to choose to be a footballer. If you studied the Barcelona academy for traders, if there were one, how confident and better would you be as a trader? Off the richter scale, in my opinion. We are self taught and self regulated that is too tough in my opinion.
1 hour trading from 06:00 to 07:00 - I didn't do that today, I traded from 11:00 to 12:00 to time myself to see how long the prep work takes.
I'll trade in the morning before anyone else is up here at home - that's the plan - and then eat breakfast and go to work. The key to making it work will be getting into bed to sleep early enough. I'm talking 10:30 eyes shut. Might be difficult.
Today trading: I think 11:00 to 13:00 is a crap time to trade, I'm sure the stats would prove me right if I looked at the average ADX for instance, grouped by hour over a long period.
Not much of an excuse though. 4 trades, 3 losses one B/E. The first 2 losers were schoolboy errors that I should never make again. Thought I had a channel but I only had 2 points of contact so it wasn't a channel yet. The BO went nowhere obviously. Overtrading essentially. I don't think I had the thought that the channel wasn't ready - I just wanted to find a setup. Impatience.
Second loser was because of my stop getting caught. I have a bad illusion that some candlestick patterns will propel the market away without ever a retrace. I know that's wrong. Old stale knowledge in my head coming out under pressure. I need to put my stop at 1 ATR away from my entry just to save myself from noise - 1 candle stop-outs. I can scrub a trade on bad PA, but I can't just shove my stop closer than 1 ATR in the belief that retraces don't happen.
Third loser was big. But it was a valid setup. Just low probability I guess with the lunch hour trading in force and quite a lot of sideways movement.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
One good trade! I need to keep concentrating on that - now I'm only trading one hour, I only have the chance to make one trade if not none, so it's a bit easier because I know I've only got one chance.
Anyway, today was semi-good. I got a late entry into a BO-PB setup and then missed the correct exit. I should have bailed when price action told me to, but I didn't know whether the little voice in my head was actually the price action, or whether it was impatience that I should book the profits, or whether it was fear that I would lose it.
So I got the setup correct, entry was acceptable, but exit was poor. Should have had 12 or 15 points, only got 4.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
(1) when the quiet of the Asian session is broken with a bigger bar, it could be worth getting in to follow the market up or down to the Asian session boundary.
(2) a break-out failure or a touch at one Asian session boundary generally results in a move all the way to the other session boundary.
Both 1 & 2 presumably only have a good probability if the Asian session range isn't too big. 30 or 40 points is probably the limit. Today was 28 points.
Friday morning's trade was a difficult one. I thought I did the right thing in taking a loss at the time although there were a couple of points where I could have bailed out of the long position on bearish strength. The initial BO was weak after the strong push-up, for a start, and then on the 3 min chart the candles continued up but couldn't have looked more bearish with a big bearish tail on the next bar which should have been the entry.
I guess I screwed it up because I didn't get in on the bar I should have, so instead of thinking how bearish it looked, I was annoyed at myself for my technical error. If I hadn't made that error I might have been more bearish and taken the opportunity to bail out at B/E. But in reality I'm just not that good.
I didn't take the BO-PB failure trade since everything was too busy in the flat and I had to think about leaving the trade on while going to work so I let it go.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I'd forgotten that it's a book. I pick up one liners about trading and often forget the origins. As I was thinking about trading for an hour in the morning only, the phrase 'one good trade' came to mind and the paradigm that comes with it, from the book originally but passed on by traders.
With only an hour in my trading session now, I really do have to make it 'one good trade' - although I think the main message in the paradigm is that each and every trade should be 'one good trade' and after each trade, you have to reset your mind into that mindset - the next trade should also be just one good trade. At least that what I understand.
I haven't read the book and from the negative reviews on Amazon I think I can skip it - or do you say otherwise?
Maybe I should look into it more because my first trade in any session always leaves me nervous and on edge. I have got visualisation techniques and a mental work-out from Selk's 10 Minute Toughness. While it's great for the first trade, often after trades I need more than that to get my sh*t together again.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I read it. It wasn't the worst book I've ever read, but not a great one by any means. I really can't remember the specifics of it enough to comment on it more.
Hi Adamus. Your journal is quite interesting and I like the precise and thorough manner in which you approach learning new trading methods.
Have you tried approaching your problem with stops this way -
Check how many of your stopped out trades would have been winners if you had bigger stops and let the price simmer for a while. This should give your winning ratio. If your ratio is good and you are consistently calling winners then basically you are reading the market right and you just need to better manage your entry. Reduce your initial entry lot size to 1/5. This way your initial stop could be more generous or alternately if you are not really sure about the market then even if you get stopped out it's a much smaller loss.
Once you are in the money you can start adding to your position. Sometimes if I have a really strong opinion I even add slowly to a loosing trade to get a better average price.
Also are you are using Interactive Brokers? They are very expensive if you are learning. Their lot sizes much too big and the $5.20 minimum round trip commission is a killer. With Ninjatrader you are restricted to MB Trading or FXCM. I recommend MB Trading. They actually pay you commission if you place limit orders. And you scale down to mini lots.
No trade today. Couldn't figure out the bias and didn't see a good place to put an entry stop.
In fact the market more or less ignored the levels I was looking at.
@Traderji - thanks for the comments. I need to get to the point where I'm consistent first - even if it's only consistently break-even. I'm still too inconsistent to make it worth going over my history. But I see what you're talking about.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I checked out MBT but their spreads are bigger, so what you gain on the commission you lose on the spread. I don't know what their execution is like. I also saw their adverts for limit order payments. I don't work with limit orders - I've banned myself from using them until I can deal with entering on stops and at market first.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.