Hello,
I’ve been active on BabyPips for a few months and based on the topics and comment I can say that:
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Babypips deserves its reputation as a great place for traders
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All traders walk the same path! We all face the same problems, one after another. Some of us are solving those problems faster. While others are simply stuck with one or more of them and can’t move forward.
The last point made me compile a list of 77 trading problems + description and solutions for some of them. The result is something like a book, a guide.
That guide I would like to share with you. Attached is the Checklist PDF, so you won’t need to register to get it. That makes the guide completely free for Babypips users.
Before you go an click on the link below, you must know that it is a long guide, over 20000 words. You’ll need time to read it 
Also, it won’t mean all of your problems automatically solved. Once you identify your biggest barrier, then comes the hard part - overcoming it.
With all that said here it is
https://learn.pieceoftrading.com/learn-to-trade/
Enjoy!
Trading Barriers checklist.pdf (258.4 KB)
P.S. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated
2 Likes
They say trading is all about probabilities!
Then what do you think of this?
Maybe from all the people who read this thread…
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20% will dismiss it right away, because “somebody is selling something” or “I know everything” or “those stupid articles don’t have anything to offer, the truth is known only to traders in the big banks”
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50% will start to read it, but will never come back - “Very interesting, but I don’t have time right now will come back later”
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20% will visit the article more than once but won’t finish it - “I can’t understand that part, what does it mean” or “this is too complicated, there must be an easy way to make a profit”
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8% will read everything, but this is where it all ends “next article please” or “it’s good, I’ll delve into details after I check that cool trading algo with AI and machine learning”
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Only 2% will read everything, will make notes and will try to improve something in their trading - “These are my problems! Now let me deal with them, one by one”
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?% will share their biggest problem here
Learning your weaknesses, and trying to handle them will lead you to the conclusion that some barriers can be broken once and for all while others will remain active till your last trading day.
Let me illustrate this with the following example.
On the chart below is shown one of my trades at the moment. As you can see I’ve opened multiple longs in s&p500. Red lines are stop-losses. Green lines are the targets.
Many traders have the “cut profits short” problem while I had just the opposite - I was waiting for too long. So long that sometimes I saw how winning positions turned into losers.
Knowing the problem is one thing, but how do you solve it? This one - you can’t. At least not once and for all.
Having an average (realised) win bigger than your average (realised) loss is a huge advantage in trading! But you can’t reach this without waiting. And with waiting comes the risk of market reversal.
Look at where my targets are now. Can it go there? The only way to find out is to wait. And while waiting, I am trying to judge the strength of the market. Trying to find a place where to raise my stops and so on. I’ve set some rules which will signal to close (earlier than the target). All of this was created with the purpose to show me some indication that waiting is over and I have to close.
And every day I have to remind myself that I don’t have to be that greedy this time and this is not the mother of all trends
That is how I fight this barrier in every single trade.
Please do not copy that trade. I can be wrong. It might hit my stop. It may never go to this target and so on. This is just to illustrate how 3 barriers from the list above are influencing one trade.
It is interesting how only one position might touch so many common trading problems.
Like the case of the running stop-loss
This is a screenshot of the same position in S&P500, made earlier today.
What barrier #18 is explaining is that when the price is moving closer and closer to your stop you are tempted to move the stop further away.
We should never do that. If the stop is at the wrong place you will have the chance to check this after the position is closed. Being in a trade, especially when the price is very close is not the time to make such decisions.
But what if your stop-loss survives that close encounter? What to do then?
