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May re-enter if gold can find support. There is a potential triple bottom in place. For the size move I am targeting, my stop should really be at 1667, but I am not there yet. Slowly I am trying to increase my stop loss and my target range. It is a tough psychological barrier for me, especially knowing that I can trade net profitable gowing for smaller moves. But, I am pushing to have a much higher reward to risk per trade and am going to play this trade out.
I appreciate you coming back to my post, but it wasn't necessary. At first I was bothered by your original reply, but as I continued to read it,I felt as though that maybe I was disrupting the purpose of the thread, which is your journal. The original question/post was never intended to question your methods or trade selection. I was questioning the wave count aspect, but not because I felt that I was right, but because I am continually confused be EW and wish I never heard of the methodology. Also, you had made a comment about different traders seeing different things in the same chart. Nothing could be more true than that. I was seeing weakness and you were seeing strength.
Reading your other posts about the long trade, and your desired targets, I've come to understand that it doesn't really mater who is right. One just needs to be right enough to achieve a target. Maybe I'm not right about that, I don't know.
As far as the feelings and thoughts you have had about posting to a journal, you are not alone. I used to have a journal and then stopped posting a long time ago. Still trying to find "my method" and worried about posting negative results. Sorry, don't mean to get off topic.
I think its good you decided to continue to post and I enjoy the posts and the analysis.
I started this thread as more instructional, so no worries about posting here. Even the conversations that occur within this thread are a nice addition to an ongoing journal. It allows me to see things differently. There is no wrong post here. I intended for my original reply to be constructive, but after reading it later thought it possibly had a harder edge than I felt it did while I was typing.
When I type in this post, I see no one. I am alone in a room and conversing by keyboard with a computer screen to people I don't know a thing about. I have tried to reach out to a few traders to meet in person and have a few drinks, talk about trading in a low key environment, but for some reason that seems to be the end of the conversation. lol!
I am a firm believer that succeeding at trading requires a combination of skills, and that possibly the most important of those is to believe in your trade. My typical winning trade percentage is only around 60%. A lot of what counts as a loss for me are times I enter and then close with 8-15 ticks down, but my normal initial stop loss is 30-40 ticks in CL, which I attempt to tighten to 15-20 fairly quickly. But my average loss is less than my average win. And that is possibly the biggest factor in how I trade profitably.
I have been following the large swings for some time now, but never attempt to take more than 100 ticks +/- in any single trade. That is something I am wanting to change about my trading, and my current pursuit of a swing trade in gold is pushing me outside my normal comfort zone. But, I have tracked enough large moves that I am developing more faith in them. My desire for immediate gratification and/or the release I feel when I close a profitable trade is the biggest thing holding me back. It is like 50-60 tick profits have become my drug of choice, and it is a hard addiction for me to break, and I am fighting myself somewhat in an effort for transformation.
For example, there was a resistance point in gold I noted a few days ago that held flawlessly at a 618. I would have loved to take that short, and that is right in my comfort zone; defined resistance, downward minor trend. But I made myself wait for a larger trade on the higher trend. So, if something in my subconscious caused me to respond to you with the feeling of some friction, what possibly surfaced is some of my own re-training of myself. Maybe I was re-affirming my goal to focus on the bigger picture.
I can't remember where I heard this, have done way too many trading courses, but someone said something like; when we refer to ourselves as "traders" it brings about the feeling that we need to be doing something. We are here to "trade", not to "watch".
My current training for myself is to look for trades where I watch more and trade less. I want a reward to risk of 5 times to 1, or better. To get that, by my experience, takes some getting used to being wrong often. But I was never able to maintain ongoing profitability until I was willing to be wrong more than I wanted to be. And still, that is the weakest part of my trading.
This may sound insane, but I am actually trying to shift to being right closer to 40% of the time, and that is proving to be ridiculously tough for me. Of course the reward to risk would have to be larger, but over and over I see my 50-60 tick temptation, and I become weak. Possbly the weirdest part of my obsession is that I am taking a proftable style and wanting to ignore it, or at least change it.
I am reading a book on trading psychology right now, and in the first chapter it gives an example of how in school we need 90% to get an "A", and that we are tested for a drivers license, or a professional license, or a credit score. We are taught early, and reinforced perpetually, to strive for high win percentages. 60% wins equates to a "D-", and I seem determined to strive for an "F".
Thanks for you post David, and for your good spirit.
Gary, am working on releasing a new screenshot capture app for futures.io (formerly BMT) users (for Windows), will let you capture your screen, mark it up, and paste it on futures.io (formerly BMT) with one click instead of the many clicks it takes now. Just FYI. I will let you know when it is ready to test out. It will have trend lines, fibonacci, and other drawing and mark up tools built-in.