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Well, yeah. I was talking about the fact what happens to the struggling trader dealing with his goal. He starts to become blindsided. You call that beginning stage, but this stage can take very long, sometimes even years. But I agree with your statement about professionalism will diminish the chance of inattentional blindness.
Again, you may compare it to driving. Initially it's so difficult to follow and see everything on the road. After a couple of years you don't even realize you notice probably 70% of things on the road, your mind is so used to it that acts unconsciously. I believe same things happens to trading. But the one has to survive long enough to develop this level of automatization.
Then probably comes another problem when you need to change that automatization pattern (because market changed, you changed, your understanding changed etc.), but that will be the next story I think
Another factor that is easily overlooked is to have "your house in order" to . I've mentioned it before in this thread, but many times it is easily overlooked and will affect our trading without us even noticing it.
Many of us here on NexusFi are trading from home, from school, or from someplace other than a professional trading office. Some have children running around in the house, or babysitting, or schoolmates or something else that distracts them while trading leading to suboptimal conditions, loss of focus and/or concentration which lead to bad trading decisions.
Therefore, we must not forget that a prerequisite to trading is having your house in order. I've experienced many times this important prerequisite, that's why I'm explicitly posting it here as a reminder
Just a thought here, but in general, why are you basing your position size upon your account balance? Your risk on any trade should not exceed 2% of your balance I'd say. That automatically determines your maximum position for the trade. If you have your risk calculated, you then automatically determine your size. Could be 5 lots for one trade, 8 for another. You don't have to care as your risk is the same.
That way, you never have to worry about specific thresholds, targets or anything. Just be mechanical about it.
Also, don't measure your results in money, but in R, 2R on a trade, 1R on a trade, 2.6 or 4.3 and so on.
If you have a positive R you are profitable if you keep your risk the same on every trade (simple math).
I hope that helps you to think in a different pattern than jumping from level to level.
Thank you for your feedback! I do know about the existence of R-multiples, but I honestly never got interested in using it. I mostly use Risk Reward and ticks and yes of course I am also not over leveraging. The problems were more in overtrading and other psychological issues that you can read about in this thread. However, your recommendation got me another look into R-multiples, and I do see the some advantages in using it, especially when increasing size. It kind of makes the whole thing more abstract to express things in R and it also gives you direct insight in your risk. I'll start using it and see if I likt it and if it helps improve my trading, so thanks for your recommendation!
I have just read trough the whole thread and am very thankful for all the contents. I got interested in this topic since yesterday I experienced the same problem as described in detail by @rdaytrader, only difference being that I do not fall into revenge trading. My issue is that I am still in demo trying to achieve a positive expectancy. Once I am able to trade my way out of my historic demo account losses I will start to trade microlots in a life account. I have reached my goal so far twice and was almost ready to start live trading. When I reach my goal of positive expectancy (my barrier) I get excited and destroy my trading results completely in one day.
As I wrote above this has happened twice so far. When it happened for the first time some 7 months ago I was about to quit trading. Nevertheless after a break of some 4 months I started again and did much better and progressed faster. The day before yesterday I reached my goal for the second time and since I did not have the live account ready I traded yesterday again in the demo account and messed up completely.
I fell into massive overtrading with poor trade positioning. Out of that I did not leave my trades running and closed them far too early. Nevertheless I was confident that I was able to trade my way out of the losses until the daily loss was huge. I still would not have blown my demo account since I am practicing also with micro lots exactly as I want to trade in the live account but y set a new low to my account in one day which of course completely destroyed my expectancy per trade. Therewith I do not start live tradeing since of course confidence gets a big hit.
When this happened the first time I doubted my ability to trade. Now with this second occurence of this problem I have no doubts about my abbility to trade. I am certain that this is a pure psychological issue. I believe that going live makes no sense as long as I am not able to deal with that still unknown inner demon. I am fully aware that trading is a performance discipline at which one has to win against oneselfs inner demons. Once that is achieved success will come automatically.
Yesterday I felt like a small boy that after a long time finds out how to ride a bycicle, when he realizes that he now knows how to maintain balance on the bycicle he gets excited. In the moment of excitement the boy gets hit by a car because he did not concentrate on the traffic anymore.
At this point I do not know yet how to overcome this problem but this whole thread gives some very good inputs as a starting point.
Since this thread is already old I would be very interested in your progress on this issue @rdaytrader
Thanks again to everybody who has contributed.
I'm glad my thread was of some help for you.
I can tell you that this is a very difficult problem to overcome and it is a psychological one.
I can also tell you that I am still dealing with it as I recently encountered the issue again. You can read the details on my journal . I can advise you to start your own journal too, this is one of the things that will help. The other thing that seems to work for me is to forget about the P&L as much as possible and focus on percentages only. Defining your profits and losses in terms of percentages of your account size is one of the key ingredients, in my opinion.
