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If it's that hard to hold for 10 instead of 6-8, put the trade on, and walk away for 10 minutes, or set a sound that will trigger when the stop/target is hit, and just don't come back until you hear the sound.
But then, you have to have the willingness and discipline to actually walk away, which might just be harder than sitting there, depending on you.
So, unless you pay someone in advance to hold a gun to your head and force you to take the 10 ticks or to walk away, or the person will shoot you, then in the end you still have to "just DO it." You are a thinking person and sometimes the best way for a thinking person to approach these things is to turn off your brain, reach down and reaffirm that your balls are there and intact, and hang on for the ride. This is a risk game, and those who cannot accept risk will not get paid.
@GaryD is right.. because we are trading with our minds and our bodies we need to physically move and actually practice change. Lots of the great thinkers of the past called what you are doing (and what I do by the way too !) "repetition compulsion" or "eternal recurrence".
The clear case of chickening out of trades either when in the green or in the red is due to anxiety that is getting the better of you. There is no doubt about this. Your body is telling you to hit the exit side of the DOM and .. well .. you do.
There is one reasn that this is relevant to this thread.
@PandaWarrior spoke in a Webinar about the 7 P's. It is a military term for
"Perfect Prior Practice Prevents Piss Poor Performance"
*or something like that ...
Now .... trading a few contracts of CL , ES , GC or indeed the FDAX is pretty stressful. However having someone shoot very hot metal at your face is even a tinch more stressful I would say.
SIM is the answer because your mind and your body get to learn how it is to hold through that pullback or indeed resist entering a trade on a fast moving candle. Both of which we all know make sense .. but ... knowing and doing are what we wrestle with.
SIM, Combine .. it's all the same. Doing it makes it feel right ..
Two trades today. Both executed to near perfection. Second one I panicked and exited for two reasons.
1. At the beginning of the day, I had turned off my PnL on the DOM. Then later on, I had restarted my platform in the middle of the trading day and when I reloaded it, the PnL came back on. In the middle of the trade, I noticed it was flashing my pnl at me.....I knew this was not supposed to be happening and so that threw me a little bit,
2. Then I noticed I was above the money goal I had set for myself today. Instantly, I started thinking about closing the trade to make darn sure I would make at least that much for today. (Stupid is as stupid does at this point). So in a few nano seconds, I had this intense conversation with myself and the flight, fight or freeze impulse won out and I closed the trade.
Net result: I made my dollar goal for the day. Double my average. Nicely done. However, price went to my target more than 60 ticks away and 40 from my exit. I left another $1200 on the table with that one little piece of trade management.
An excellent example of why one should turn off the PnL. I was prepared to let this one run because after sitting forever waiting, it was behaving exactly the way I wanted it to in order to catch a nice runner.
Lesson learned. I have already saved my DOM settings this time around so that won't happen again.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
I mostly disagree with this. No amount of courage in sim will fix chickening out live. Sim is only for figuring how to do something. Mechanics mostly. Once or twice in sim, then back to live.
So I suggest moving to forex, trade minis or micros until the fear of losing is dealt with.
Either that or man up as they say and just do it.
Fear of losing is both real and misplaced. Trading is a losers game. Accept it and move on. Fight it and keep losing. As traders, we will fight this until we retire, in the meantime, best to try and accept it.
The winners are those that fall on the sword of acceptance and simply play the odds while losing small.
Trading crude oil with a 6-8 tick target and hoping to make money long term is a suckers bet. ES or ZN maybe. But CL? lets be real here.
If you trade many lots and you are very good at scalping, maybe. Otherwise better to look for at least 30-50 ticks.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Love it - I think this should be used in school education.
@iqgod On the waiting for 10 points or not, sim or micro accounts... I found that once I started to understand what type of trader I am (1-5 positions a day trying for one larger move) then the rest started falling into place. Maybe 5 or 8 points (more trades per day with shorter goals) is how you are built. Maybe scalping but I cannot recommend this as I cannot do it except to drain any account I have. What target amount do you want to take profits at regularly? Can your style then be built around that? Need to adapt risk management, be aware of commissions but for me understanding how I am wired helped me work through this stuff. Find a target amount that works for you and start developing your plan around what comes naturally or intuitively. Its worth trying and at the very least you can try and rule it out if it does not work (which is a valuable step in growing as a trader).
Why get out of trade with an inordinately small loser or winner, if the expected value of the trade is still good? You're simply locking in small losses and winners. You are not only risk averse, but loss averse. For an extremely intelligent person, there does not appear much thought involved in your trading. The execution of a trading plan is essential to profitable trading. Without a goal, without specific, well-articulated criteria, you cannot craft an executable trading plan, and you will find that you are just waffling and flailing about. Read Josh's posts and Brian's posts for practical advice on how to design and implement a profitable strategy. Risking 10 to make 10 is not one of them.
When implementing a strategic trade, a good compromise between profit maximization and loss mitigation can be achieved by balancing trade size along with a stop-loss, which when placed at a level that only an extreme event will trigger, will likely contain losses to a predetermined range, and also prevent getting stopped-out of a potential winner. If one is disciplined, maintaining a mental stop-loss level is preferable to an order pre-placed in the book, and available for all the bots to scan.
This strategy carries forward to trade management. Its always easier to find an excuse for getting out of your winners, than for getting out of your losers. At times, the best "next trade", is simply staying in the current trade. Which is why a trader needs a decision process for managing the expectation or expected value of the trade as well as the equity. What matters, I think, is the expected value of the trade at each moment, and balancing that against P&L and a margin of error to ensure, "staying in the game".
Short of electro-shock conditioning, I know of no other way than just to just keep doing it, till you can do it. And like Brian said, you have to do it with real money on the line. This is an emotional problem , not an intellectual problem, and SIM removes the emotion from the equation.
Excellent post! I went through this as well and would like to add someone had said that influenced my trading a lot: test the hell out of your method. No mental gimmicks will make you feel confident about your trading and putting money at risk, as very through testing and stats collecting and journaling will do. Test, test, test. And you will feel confident and very calm. Uncertainty in risk taking comes from uncertainty in what you are doing. Think about driving in rain fast. Most people are scared and drive slowly. Because they have no confidence in what they are doing. If you go to advanced driving courses and learn to drive on wet, snow, ice, you know how to manage the skid, what to expect and how to react. You are confident in your skills. And then you are not afraid when you get in conditions like that. Same in trading. Most people don't feel confident in their approach because they never put much efforts into testing and understanding of expectations. There is no fast cure for it. But practice makes perfect.
Try forcing yourself into a different perspective, imagine (don't imagine, test!) what your trades would look like if you let them trade their full lifespan, (so remove the target, and let them all trade to their stops) and try to solve the problem from a different angle. You will likely learn there is a lot more wiggle room than you are anticipating.
