Thank you, keep the check when your million is in your haven. Instead, have a beer in my name to celebrate and pass the story on to someone who needs it to overcome a mental issue
Great story!! I am also into training my mind too and one of my favourite motivators, if I can call him that, is Eric Thomas. Lots of his motivational speeches on Youtube. My favourite quote from him is “If you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, you will be successful.” BTW now I listen to his speeches from my ipod as I am falling asleep.
How about make a beer in your name mate? lol. That sounds like a plan. Hope your trading is going great! When I first started, it took me over a year to break the mental issues I was having as a noob trader.
My trading is getting better and better for each and every day. A lot to overcome, but I take every loss as a failure on my path to success… May sound strange and pretty weird, but I actually enjoy my failures sometimes…they take me one step further
That’s good news to my ears. I see only the upside in a loss. Each loss is me learning how to trade and I accept them as lessons to be learned from. Everyone says you have to accept losses and you are going to lose blah blah blah. that’s utter bull****, If i accepted my losses, then I would never improve my system and learn what the market is telling me. I strive for perfection and with my determination I am certain I will find it!
Keep trading mate, It takes a strong person to be able to take the beatings when we receive them.
Scorpius - I couldn’t agree more with you. The Holy Grail to Trading, Happiness, Success, Life and everything else is your own mind. Our minds are the most powerful things in the Universe - we can change the world with how we think. This is why people fail at anything (or indeed succeed at everything) - our minds create our realities and control our results. One of my favourite Trading Books ever is by Van Tharp, called Trading Beyond the Matrix. The book is about how personal psychology can work for you instead of against you. Trading is not about using the latest winning strategy or even following the most successful person’s strategy, it is about mastering yourself which is why trading is often so difficult to do succesfully on a continuous basis. It’s not that following a strategy or understanding indicators is hard (that’s the easy part), it’s knowing thyself and the Trading floor is one of the most expensive places on earth to find out who you really are. We’ve all done it: Sabataging our trades, moving stop losses when we swore we wouldn’t and not having a clear plan about what we will do and then sticking to it. This is why Trading Journals are so important. They map out what we want and how we want to do it and what our goals are and we lock in dates for our goals. We know when to get in and more importantly when to get out. If we stick to this then we are far more likely NOT to blow our accounts - the likelihood of our success is greatly increased. But, we don’t stick to the rules - we get on a high when we make a good return and risk more than our maximum percentage rules. It’s so easy to do. So, discipline your mind and the rest will follow. Good trading everyone.
Everything you said made me smile inside because I recognize that it is what I want as well as am going through. To hear about your process, written out so thoroughly was a great relief, it meant that I was not the only one facing these difficulties. I loved it when you said becoming successful at anything simply takes hard work and determination, that’s it.
I too have had hopes of striking it rich, becoming famous, gaining fame and recognition etc, etc, but it seems its only everyone else around me that is experiencing that, not me. Yet, in the things that I have committed to, I have succeed at it. So thanks for sharing my friend, it help made it easier for me to hear that it is “not just me” having these experiences in Forex, it takes the load of my consciousness. Good luck to you and to everyone else here who are bravely sojourning on this path of financial and personal freedom, for I do not see any difference between the two. Godspeed!
Totally True!!
“It all lies within your mind and heart.”
You know the markets, the fundamentals… are not your enemy. Your worst enemy lives inside your head…
That has got to be the best story I have ever heard! Love the CAR Man! Way cool! Fritz - US Arizona
Hi,
I really enjoyed reading your post. You are so very right, you have to believe and commit to succeeding otherwise you will fail.
Takes a lot of experience to get to that one line doesn’t it lol That’s how life works though.
Hope you make it!
absolutely…and permit me to add 1 more item to the list: the brokers.
Hi, I learned a vital lesson yesterday ( and lost loads of money) and it was because I did not have my head together and I refused to see what my indicators were telling me… I realised a while ago that forex does not always adhere to the ‘rules’ and is rather tricky and volatile, and so I started to trade indices as they are more consistent. One of my indicators is - on the hourly chart, if the 10 ma is above the 20ma and the macd is green or positive, then today the price will go up. Simple, but the price kept on dropping back with news and I sold - lost - sold - lost ! Thinking that the daily chart with 10ma below the 20 ma and red macd would overrule the hour and the hour was about to change and go down !! Wrong.! When it is crossed over up (10/20 ma) and green macd - we are going up, crossed down with red macd we are going down. Had I bought the weakness I would have won instead ! At the end of the day, the hourly chart indicators tell you exactly what’s happening today and I had let emotion get a hold of my head - I allowed myself to ‘think’ instead of automating my days trading to my set rules and removing emotion. I will persevere, I will make myself a better trader !
First of all I am glad that so many of you actually are getting something out of this thread…thats why I shared it in the first place… now I’m back again from 2 months holiday around scandinavia with family and friends…even did a few car show with my new 1957 Buick Special I bought very early this spring…and guess what! …I’t was pure original, I slightly modified it earlier before springbreak, lowered it to the floor, gave it some nice new classic wheels and spent several days in my garage polishing it, making it nice and shiny… and BANG! …at the first car show I went home with two prices again. 3rd place from the jury that loved the attitude I made to the car and the visitors woted my car to win “car of the show”.
Again…success and I simply love it.
It has come to my believe…and experience that when you first succeed at something after years of struggling your next success will come a lot easier than the first one… You have done all the mistakes before and you know by experience what to do to get to the top again without wasting time doing things that wont work.
This car season has been an affirmative season to me… now I know that what I spent years of making the last time…I now made in just a few weeks because I knew exactly what to do by years of experience and failure.
I’m not quite there yet with the financial monster called forex… but I’m taking this new experience with me to forex knowing that all my failures will one day make me successfull in the market.
Actually… I don’t think anyone will be 100% successfull before they have made all the mistakes there is to be made and learned from it.
First then you will know absolutly eveything NOT to do and start doing things right
Hope you all had a great summer…I’m back and do seriously have some read up to do after two months of vacation
HAHA great post man!
VERY TRUE - I agree 90 % of what you say…
Persistence and DESIRE are key…Winners Never Quit and Quitters Never Win…taken from Napolean Hill himself…
However, with Guitars, Cars, Dancing and other things in life, there is usually a proven set of techniques and steps to learning. Each of those steps requires constant practice over and over, never quitting despite past failures, discouragement. Right now I am determined to learn Salsa with my two left feet (lol) but am discouraged by past failures, fear of failure etc…It is ridiculous really…I speak Spanish, have travelled to several latin countries, (I am Jamaican) yet I see people who can only say hola dance with all the hot girls and latinas…If I hadnt given up everytime and taken long breaks in between, I would be great at it now. But the thing about Salsa is it can be learnt doing all the moves over and over–moves that have clear techniques.
With Forex, however, it is somewhat different. There is no set proven technique. Most people are trying to figure out and hope they come up with one that works. I spent 6 years doing so, mainly on the lower time frames trying to scalp and day trade because this is what we are told works. Yet it was only when used the larger trends of the market that I was successful. Nevertheless I still persisted with the short-term strategies hoping that one of them will payoff. It was only after my last failed short-term strategy that I decided to focus on the larger charts, develop a strategy and stick with it.
My point is, persistence and desire are mental toughness are great tools to have, but if you are using them in a context that has no proven technique AND has a very low chance of success (day trading, lower time frames) it comes out to nothing.
My humble advice is that the search for a technique is likely to found using the higher time frames. The pain and suffering and financial loss have been unbelievable trying to day trade and I think a lot the difficulty traders have is due to this widely promoted way of trading. My thread in Swing Trade is aimed at convincing traders to switch based on my methodology- a real challenge but one I think so far many traders have already benefitted from
Thanks
Just wanted to share this with you all. I read it on twitter from a blog by Steve Burns (@sjosephburns), and it has helped me a lot today:
I also recommend reading Marty Schwartz - pit bull.
A big thing that trips up new traders is they get an entry signal at a breakout or a bounce off a key moving average like the 50 day simple moving average but have trouble quantifying how to let the it run if it is a winner or cut the loser short if it goes down. How to get out near the top instead of giving back a bulk of the run on the way back down. Shorter term moving averages let you trade a big up trend on a shorter time frame and give you a way to quantify a trailing stop and where to enter and exit if you missed a past key entry point.
I came across this quote from Market Wizard Marty Schwartz from his book: Pit Bull.
“The 10 day exponential moving average (EMA) is my favorite indicator to determine the major trend. I call this “red light, green light” because it is imperative in trading to remain on the correct side of a moving average to give yourself the best probability of success. When you are trading above the 10 day, you have the green light, the market is in positive mode and you should be thinking buy. Conversely, trading below the average is a red light. The market is in a negative mode and you should be thinking sell.” – Marty Schwartz
I agree completely with his observation and I have found the same thing in my independant chart studies. Also in sharply up trending stocks the 5 day EMA is respected and acts as support. At times the 5 day ema also acts as resistance as it currently is in $GOOG as it is having trouble breaking through and holding above the 5 day EMA after falling from all time highs rather quickly. The key is to find an up trending stock that respects the 5 day or the 10 day moving averages and then the moving average itself can be used for entry and exit signals for short term trend identification. I do primarily use the 5 day ema nd the 10 day sma in my own personal trading.
What moving averages do is identify and track trends, they quantify entry and exit points and are not open to opinion: they are facts. They track the real flow of capital and are used as signals by many traders, that is why you will see reactions many times at key levels.
This is a simple system that can get new traders trading on the right side of the market with advice from the pen of a real millionaire market wizard.
I have written on this post many times before to tell you how well I have done and to share my experiences with everyone. However, I have not done well at all of late and I wondered if anyone could help me.
M husband is ill and cannot work, and over the last 3 years I have taught myself how to trade. I have won many trades and lost many trades and although the upshot is that I now know how to do it, and have devised a trading plan, I do not have the money to invest in my trading account as I have now lost the small amount of money I could allow myself to deposit. As I am very painfully aware, I have lost in order to learn the lessons by making mistakes and paying heavily for them. My biggest mistake has been to set my stops way too close, my stops have then been taken and the trade continues in the direction that I was on. The positive from this is the knowledge I have gained and I am positive that I now know how to trade. However, I am now at a loss as to how to move forward and I wondered if anyone could help me.
Hi all, this is my favorite post of all time, as i consider myself a successful trader, i made 145% over weeks with a winrate of 76/100 trades. then lot it all the next 2 weeks. This was down to fear, hope, greed and regret. You learn 10x more from a loser than a winner as when it hurts your money you sit up and pay attention. But I already knew i needed to work on my mental training. But now you have given me the drive to actually do something about it.
Thank You!
'best
darth