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I was curious to know how you other traders over come you fear in the markets
1. After bad past experiences
2. Every trading day
So
No1. basically when i 1st started tarding and went live and blew my 1st account...as you do
how did you guys over come that fear you get left with after such experience
I over come this by continious practice is SIM untill i felt conftiable again, but still i had such big issuse when going back on my live account. As soon as my dome was live with white back ground (on Ninja trader) i would literally start to shake and sweat. This 1 made me unconfident and neverious and 2 affected my reactions and decisions when trading
No2. Every day still when i trade, in the process of starting my computer up and start getting ready for work. I still feel these emotions kick in. That nervous feeling and a light sweat, like when you going on a 1st date or you doing some thing you dont feel confident doing. Even tho i have been trading for a few years now i still get this gut feeling every day
So i wanna know how you guy going about solving these issues
I help this by having the same routine every day, i get up turn my computer on, have breakfast and start my morning routine ect
once i have done my 3000 million step morning routine and prep and i am ready to trade, i then switch off global simulation and set my DOM to my live accounts
i now feel confident and ready for what every the market throws at me
Then once i exacute my trade, if i start 2 get nervious and start feeling my emotions kick in. I turn my music up and try to stay focoused on the market and not my position
This helps me alot
BUT....i have found in the past, once things go wrong
its like a steady slop up with a vertical drop down..i have not been in that situation for a while now, but im sure you all know exacly what im talking about
DIGGING your self a hole, once you make a small error and let you emotions jump in. Literllay you can start a vicious circle of mistakes were you start revenge trading
So i was curious how you guy and gals cope with this pressure this job brings and how you manage your fear and emotion in these times
Honestly, my emotions in sim and the transition to live were very similar...a wreck.
I treated my sim trades as if they were live.
I know that's not the usual for people but I don't like losing money, even if it's fake money!
I don't like losing period but with time you come to accept it's part of the game.
You win, you move on. You lose, you move on. You're going to lose money at first and you may for
a while. I know an extremely talented programmer (one of the best on the internet that many people follow) that
has not been profitable for 3 years now.
I would catch myself being affected by the trade so I simply would tell my mind to
'let the system do that work....let the system do the work'. That seemed to calm my nerves
and take a step back. If you give your brain instructions, it will follow them.
If you're feeling seriously uncomfortable about a trade, then you probably shouldn't be in it.
Get back in when you have a clearer head.
Before you get in a trade, you have to know when you're getting out, whether it be positive
or negative. Simply having a solid trading plan should chill your emotions as well.
This is a business. Treat it like so. You need to have everything written out; a foundation,
that will be adjusted as you hone your skill with more efficient and profitable ways of doing business.
What worked for me after having had a severe 30% hit on my account (too big position size with too much ego after a very successful month): Checking setups papertrading again, just dabble around with no expectancy. Then practice how and when to get in and out with your normal risk management rules/contract/ordersize you would apply to your live account .
After success start with the smallest ! position size trading your real money again (micro contracts or less in spot forex) to overcome fear. Grow, but not overleverage to sizes you can´t handle yet, again.
However, I did what so many others do on sim. Well, it is fake right...
To me, if you can't papertrade profitably, then move to sim profitably then to live profitably than you are just making your broker rich.
I can papertrade miraculously well.
I can sim trade (about break even lately).
When I would take the dip to live (a year ago+) then I would just eat at my account slowly.... I didn't like that...
I realized that emotions were my issue and that if I could not have a hefty 'gap' or 'margin' in my profits then I most likely would continue to let the emotions eat me into negativity again.
Now, I absolutely treat it like real money even on SIM. I find every few weeks that I fall out of that, but it is rarer and rarer.
To me, if you are having an issue on LIVE, than you are trading too much margin or trading scared money. For now, I have scared money and that is part of the reason I do not go live. I have some big $'s coming soon, but for now, I have scared money...
So, if you have the following then I would go live:
Papertrade profitably
Sim Trade Profitably w/ Margin of mental error
Live trade breakeven to positive (will give you positive momentum to do more)
Than your training wheels will slowly come off... Just my opinion.
If I trade futures on sim, on Ninjatrader it's the same way I trade live. If I lose on sim I get very despondent and a overall loss on a session makes me feel as I know nothing about trading for the rest of the day, just the same as on live. Sure the "pain" of losing on sim is less than losing real money.
Sure I've fooled around adjusting the sim with a million account and trading 50-100 contracts for fun and not worrying about margin calls but only for fun usually trading replay at 10x to 200x playback speed.
But when there's a live market during a liquid period going on, I find it hard to resist playing the sim like real. Then I set the sim account to the same amount as my live account and sim off the live charts. Because I believe my poorest performance on sim reflects my poorest performance on live. To the point I get scared playing sim almost as much as live.
I feel the same way. Losing a couple grand isn't that big of deal really. But, doing it day-in, day-out and just the overall disgusting feeling of being wrong is what sinks me...
My worst trade is -85K. That was painful for me and something I wish to never repeat.. I have several in the 20K-30K range and many below that, but that one stands out in my only time I think that I felt the money concern me to an extreme.
Sorry to hear about those losses. I got margin called so was forced to get hit with a loss which halved my account. I was using way too many contracts. Because I got overconfident and was making 1k to 3k a day for about a month. So it's definitely possible once one gets to a consistent level. And there are stories of those who make much more per day all over trading forums. But I had not prepared myself psychologically for a big loss at the number of contracts I was overdoing. ;
Yes, now I would agree psychological consistency is my main goal. Also knowing when to get out and when not to trade. I am thinking about trading until a daily profit goal. Then trading sim the rest of the day for practice. But the temptation to continue to trade live is enormous at that point Then after a big loss , there's a lot of fear to overcome to trade live again.