Changing the goal post

Greetings, just a quick question for traders and trading enthusiast full time, part time, hobbyists and critics.

Do you ever find that you frustrate your own trading success by constantly changing the goal post for what trading success means. When your trading ability is at or above a level you set for yourself a very long time ago without even realising it, but yet you are not content.

Yes, I have let this happen to me twice in recent years. through all that time period I have been a long-term trend-follower. A couple of years back I reviewed my trade log and decided if I could eliminate the trades taken off the worst performing entry signals, I would have fewer trades stopped out. That’s the way it looked on paper but the reality was that I found my best performing entry signals did not always perform that well. Maybe it was a small sample size or a statistical anomaly, but as soon as I went back to taking every trend that fitted my set-up rather than filtering by entry signal as well, I went back to making money.

Secondly, I recently realised I had gone back to setting my stops too tight. Without going into detail, you could say I was looking at daily support/resistance levels for stop prices and I should have been looking at weeklies.

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Yeah it’s true. It may happen that later you are not happy with your profit. Sometimes it happens when you see screenshot claiming I am making that much. Expectations should match the skills you have not what other doing or showing. With skills development, changing goal is ok. But if my skills/capabilities are same but I am changing the goal. It’s wrong.