Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
I think "misreading price action" is the "easy out" option in this poll. Of course, at the end of the day, you can always see how you should have done things, but this is with the benefit of perfect hindsight. Looking at a chart at the end of the day is a useless exercise, unless of course it's in the context of examining trades you actually took; even then, it's only a static snapshot of what happened, and does not bring along with it any real sense of order flow, momentum, and your own emotions and thoughts which cannot be simulated or reproduced. Analyzing your execution and yourself (in real time, particularly) are far more valuable than analyzing a 5-minute bar chart at the end of the day.
So, while we all can say we "misread" the market, misreading the market is usually symptomatic of the two biggies that we all dance with: fear and greed.
Post trade analysis aka the curse of knowledge.
Your ability to reason through your past actions is compromised by knowledge of the outcome.
You overestimate the degree to which you would have predicted the correct outcome.
You underestimate the possibility that things could have turned out a different way.
With post analysis you most definately will not be accounting for the heuristic shortcuts and biases that your brain uses. All you see is a sequence of events which suggest causality. THats why everyone sits there in hindisght getting all confused about decisions that were made. You dont know yourself well enough. The fight will go on until you stop trying to figure the market out and start to figure yourself out.
I didn't vote, but would have gone for "breaking rules" because its close enough to my problem of scratching trades. And I have a rule against scratching trades...
I plan every trade. So if I change either exit - I log it as a scratched winner or scratched loser - not based on the trade's realized P/L, but on the original plan. I use those numbers and the regular W/L numbers to track my Managed to Plan ratio. I did 21% in Aug and that's 2 points higher than my average YTD. And it sucks. My W/L is consistently positive, so I see this low Managed To Plan (MTP) number as a substantial opportunity cost that I'm inflicting on myself. For Aug, it was a 27% dent in my profit. The sad irony is that the planning method is designed to negate the need to manage a trade on the fly. If there was a choice for "I'm a pathetic robot", I would have voted for that.
I know this was a while ago, but, I really don't like it when people say you need about 10k to start trading, when you actually probably only need half that. If I had a 10k account, I think I'd give up trading if my drawdown was >45% since that is a lot of money to me. So why not start with 5k and keep the other 5k in your bank rather than letting your broker hold onto it?
I want to vote "overtrading" or more likely "something else".
I'm pretty happy with my trading in terms of return etc.
BUT I think trading needs to be efficient.
Sometimes I sit watching screens when I don't need to be. Sometimes I read too many reports. Like in the past, I'd use too many indicators.
Instead of screenwatching, I could be exercising (even while watching the screen), I could be working on my other business, or doing something else entirely.
I'd also like to improve the business side of my trading and the networking side.
I think these can be just as important as how you buy, sell and leverage.
In other words, particularly in the past, I'd like to be more efficient with my time.
Anyone else (probably those who have traded a while) feel like/have felt like that?