Your Trading Secret?

Hey, he tried, sometimes you never know…

When I used to Handicap Horses, In my beginning days, I once asked an Old timer what his secret was, and he told me, changing the way I looked at races from that very day, And the answer was less then 5 words…

No one who is a successful will tell their secrets to anyone. The basis is that the success is both difficult to achieve as well as maintain.

Don’t bet on horses?

Find a system that works for you and your temperament. Start trading with a mechanical system (i.e. follow an ironclad set of rules).

Lots of people will try to sell you their ‘secrets’ - as a rule when I see that word I run.
I do know of one succesful trader who does give away his knowledge and experience for free - you can find him on this site under the name of ICT.

Sure I will bite. What do i trade? I trade mostly index futures and currency futures intraday. I use spot Forex for swing trades on crosses I cant get in futures contracts. The thing is it doesn’t really matter what you trade, a market is a market and trading is trading. Once you know how to trade and extract value from the markets you can do it in any market. What is my secret?[B][U] Turning 1 trade into 5 trading experiences[/U][/B]. So i take 1 live trade but i “experience” it and learn from it 5 times. What do I mean by that? I mean I journal my trades, I do a end of day review where i go over my trades in the charts and see what happened, I record my trading and narrate it while i am actually live trading expressing the thoughts i am having both technical and psychological, then i review it at the end of the day, I write a daily debrief and have a score card that rates my trades on a scale of 1-5 and of course the last but not least is the LIVE TRADE itself. Now i repeat this again on the weekends when i write up my end of week analysis and review my videos from my best and worst days of the week.

This comes down to [B]deliberate and concentrated practice[/B] and [B]data driven analysis and improvement of your system.[/B] Although trading is one of those things where more you work isn’t necessarily going to improve your bottom line, if you take these steps to have deliberate practice, understand where you went right and attempt to repeat that over time consistently. Also your identifying areas you can improve and avoid mistakes faster, making your learning curve more efficient. i might make 1 mistake during the day, it cost me 1 trade loser for example. Now i have seen that situation over and over I know its cost I know what it looked like and now tomorrow I can avoid it, instead of having to have it occur several times before i even realize its something i avoid. Now another trader might need 3-5 times to even identify there is something wrong much less correct it, I can do that in half the time. Of course there is no guarantees and of course ever moment in trading is unique but it gets me to my 10k hour threshold faster.

Bottom line: Try to learn as much as you can from each trade, keep good records and use that collected data to improve your self and your system by either A) avoiding situations where you are less profitable or B) getting into more situations where you are more profitable.

the secret to trading is…KEEP LEARNING!!!..never stop learning…once you learn one secret, there’s always another one…

money management & discipline

don’t hope the market will move like what you think. no emotion

Good to see one Peter giving good advice to another Peter. I think this thread should peter out now …

There is no secret. Like any other job, you become better with practice. Stay disciplined and follow your rules.

You must determine to devote a lot of time to comprehensive learning of the financial instrument you’re planning to trade (suggestion would be currencies): to learn unique characteristics, price behaviour on it’s deepest level, patterns and etc. Then you must find set of parameters and do huge sample sizing to internalize repetitive patterns. There can’t be no rush. When you do hundreds of sample sizing, you will start to see things which repeat over and over again. Find a a few strong patterns and apply them with discipline and valid money management…

It is a long process which requires a lot of mental capital. But if you find this process passionate, only time is a barrier separating you from success.

Buy lower.
Sell higher.
Risk management.

You peter out!!..hehehe…

If I told you it would not be a secret now would it :stuck_out_tongue:

Cut you loses short and let your profits run.

That’s the third time I heard that this week…I guess it’s not much of a secret…cutting your losses short means getting out before your stop loss or letting your stop loss stop you out??

Well, it is not a secret in fact but is what the famous 95% don’t do and dthey do it in the opposite way. You will hear it again and again.

I have two more:

  1. Remember BIAS rhymes with BS****

  2. Don’t take loses personally.

One more:

You must like loses because they are the only common and sure thing. Thinking in loses free is like cold fussion, just a fraudulent myth.

I guess this has turned into some kind of axiom dictionary