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- Only trade one direction on any given day in the beginning. Long only. Short only. Look at your big charts and decide which side of the trade you want to be on, and wait for the setup, then execute only in that direction. Do not under any circumstances switch between long and short back to back to back to back. If in the beginning you can't force yourself to have the patience to trade just one way, then you are doomed. If you decide today is "longs only", and the market is clearly going down down down, that does NOT mean catch the falling knife and go long at the bottoms. It means do nothing, no trades. Later once you have a solid profitable track record you can change your direction once during the day if you read your initial charts wrong, or the market has moved big.
- Cut the number of trades in half or 1/3rd, and double or triple the stop size. All those trades with small stops are eating you up, and you are not trading at all --- you are just getting caught up in chop and noise. Give the trade a chance to work.
It's my belief traders that have not yet found long term profitability need to trade BIGGER stops and targets, and BIGGER time frames. But what happens is they do the exact opposite, going smaller charts, smaller bars, smaller stops, and they just end up trading noise.
Thanks for sharing your trades and posting on a bad day. And you are free to disagree with everything I've posted
I'm in total agreement mike !
thanks for your thoughts.
“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.”--Albert Einstein
I agree, but then you become a swing trader and a whole different style of trader. If you have mega stops, people tend to get sloppy on waiting for the right entries. Oh, well, I have 10 point stop, I am sure this is a good spot. Then they get 1 point here, 1 point there.. Then they have one stopout and voila... uh oh...
I think if you are to learn to be consistent intraday trader then smaller stops are necessary but never easy. There is a lot more noise, but also a skill that will probably bring you in a much higher IRR on your trading account or sink it... haha...
Small stops, better r:r to me is the key to success in trading. If you do large stops and small gains, then on volatile or bad times it just takes you longer to realize that you are not a consistent trader...
I think if you could practice like you are a swing trader, but make your entries intraday, then that is when you are truly profitable which was your first recommendations. I believe stops can be small if you get good at timing those entries... Then your r:r goes out of this world... Or, maybe that is just a dream I am chasing.
I know some of the most successful forex guys that I have followed just plain don't have stops and rarely exit.. Kind of interesting approach.
I cannot say that I disagree with you. I thought about stops the other day.
I took four trades pretty much on the same price in the same direction. Three of them stopped out with small losses and the last one worked out. It make more sense to risk the same amount on one trade and if it takes me out stay away for next setup.
I'm not sure about trading in only one direction. That's a good thing on trending days if diction didn't change before noon it most likely will continue in the same direction, but on the range day you can get chopped in one direction as well as in both.
About bigger time frames I agree, but for new traders it hard to see big losses. I guess forex would be solution as you said long time ago somewhere or like Bluemele does with small account.
I don't mind sharing bad days. This is my journal and I'm not trying to prove anything to anybody. I'm just documenting my trading journey. If someone wants to critic, I can take it. Not the first time.
Today was just an example of my bad discipline. Some days I just cannot take it emotionally. Hopefully I'm gonna have less and less of those days. I guess I just got greedy after a couple winning days and could't let it go. My last trades don't even make any sense. That was just pure anger.
Also I had some other people at home and I traded when I was far away from clear thinking. Don't wanna use it as an excuse. I knew that it's not right but I still did it.
I could blame it on holidays and that would be very nice.
I know it's emotional problem. I know my weakness. I stopped a few times. I thought "Whatever, -2-3 points is not a big deal. I can get it back tomorrow". Then I came back again and again and I got even more angry because I couldn't just leave. It's easy to tell someone what to do but it's very hard to control yourself.
It wasn't bad at all. I also played with CL but that wasn't just trading according to my rules. I've never traded CL before and I tried different time frame different settings and indis. Basically just clicking for no reason. But I didn't care about my results at CL.
I was concentrated on TF and it paid of.
My advice, again, take it with a grain of salt, but never click that DOM unless it counts. Think of SIM as REAL, otherwise, when you go to live your mind will screw with you.