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I voted for "Holding my winners". I track my trades and I pay attention to both maximum favorable excursion as well as what was the market telling me via price action while I was in the trade.
I've done a lot of soul-searching this week and I've found the underlying root cause to be greed and the fear of losing money. One of the hallmarks of this problem for me is that no matter how overwhelming the case for me to hold, I always think price is about to turn against me and hit my stop.
Its gone on for far too long so my action plan to overcome this self-limiting behavior is to use the MYM and focus on tackling this single issue above all else. I'm using 3 contracts in either an all-in/scale-out strategy or, if trading outside-in or something, scaling-in 1-3 contracts. I want to hold at least one contract for at least 1R. The goal is to develop the ability to adapt to the market while i'm in the trade and learn to add on to a winning trade if the price action calls for me to do so.
This has been an iterative process, I've failed multiple times at attempting this, but with each failure I learn a little more so I'm looking forward to tackling this issue and overcoming it once and for all!
My vote, insufficient time to trade. Only time to trade normal trading hours is when I get the day off work or when I’m on vacation. Have always felt if I had more real hands on time I might be trading full time. Then again maybe it has saved me from loosing countless trading accounts while learning.
From the REMINISCENCES - Page 129 ... I can can relate to this often... wish to correct this..."The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit
and I sold it out. It was an utterly foolish play, but all I can say in extenuation is that it wasn't really my deal"
I believe my biggest weakness right now is impulsiveness. If I waited only for perfect entries my win rate would no doubt climb. As it is I rely on money management and a high hit rate for my tiny edge so any improvement in that area would do wonders.
My vote was also 'insufficient time to trade'. I like the RTH hours, but I live in New Zealand and currently 10am EST is 2am NZT. I try to trade each day, but my current shift pattern means this isn't always possible. Summer will be better because the time difference moves 2hrs with daylight saving's which will change 10am EST to 4am NZT (daylight saving means NZT and EST move one hour in opposite directions so there is a two hour difference).
I'm coming from A "losers get out of hand", which luckily seems to have past. Now I am tackling B "holding winners longer".
Imho this is the typical rotation, the first one building fear and all sorts of mental assocuations with an open position, making the latter that much more difficult the longer you're not able to fix A.
If I were to hold a beginning traders hand, I would 100% focus on A first, to ensure survival of the account. B then really is where the account growth lies (unless you are in the rare breed of high% scalpers - but even Mack of PATs fame says again and again that the runners are what really shifts the numbers. Many choose to ignore this bit.)
I've mentioned this quite a bit, but my single biggest weakness right now is not adapting to / not accepting changing market conditions or trading improbable outcomes stubbornly in the hopes of getting a big winner.
I think adaptation is a function of mindfulness, a healthy dose of caution, and a real attempt at or interest of objective analysis to try to understand what is happening now to infer what a given market is likely to do next.
Some of my trades are less coherently constructed or taken in an environment I didn't fully attempt to understand, or I understood what was likely to happen and opted for the bad trade anyway. This would be taking a breakout trade on a range day because of a hunch, without seeing the increase in momentum, delta, etc., etc.
I could have written this post word for word, except that I am using 2 positions of micro contracts for position sizing flexibility instead of 3 positions. I am taking 1 off at 1 ATR or using price action and pivots. The problem I am finding is that when I scalp I should have swung, and when I resist the urge to take quick profits a d hold onto the runner, I end up with bigger losses and should have taken the quick profits.
I think bottom line is that I need to do a better job of reading whether the market is in a trending state or in a reversal state. At this point I am buying well and making few mistakes. It's all trade management.