Ah! You are learning piano? Tell us more! I teach violin and piano, by the way - this is not a pitch, I am just saying!
One thing stands out to me when I read your last post above, @elenmirie.
Forgive me for maybe being out of line here but I would say:
Whilst trading should never consume all your time or all your interests - it should consume all your concentration when you are dealing with it. I somehow get the feeling you are only half concentrating and maybe too easily being distracted by other issues, albeit issues maybe beyond your control. Take it easy. Trade when you can and not when you half-can…
I think that’s a valid criticism. I have noticed this myself. What I try to do is keep an eye on things until conditions are right. Because I’m only watching one pair, this is possible. Then when I’m actually on a trade, pay close attention. If I can’t pay close attention, then I shouldn’t be on it. But last week was pretty crummy for that, I was distracted and scattered by a number of things.
I was thinking, I need a Screen Zero… just like I use the first screen to make a strategic decision on market conditions, that informs the decisions that I make while monitoring the second screen, Screen Zero is an honest assessment of my mental state. If I’m feeling scattered and incapable of concentrating, then take some time off and do something else.
Don’t worry about being out of line, one of the reasons I’m on here is to get feedback on what I’m doing, especially from people that know what they’re doing. So, thanks!
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Hmmph! Not too sure I qualify for that group, I often wonder about that!!! 
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Lack of emotional control
We don’t care, the market participants don’t care.
Lack of emotional and self control
11 to 44 is a negative expectancy, this will lose in the long run. You are training yourself improperly, you need to focus on the basics
I have no idea what you mean by this, either you know your context/premise, entry, exit, stop, or you don’t. once you are in you are in. You might get to the point where you can actively manage a trade, pyramid, cut short etc. But for now you need to focus on getting the direction right.
This must be something akin to EST training, I have no idea.
The Ever Hating These Microscopic Millennial Fonts VIPER
PS And Yes millennial is a pejorative
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Well, last week was not as good as the week before. I did the numbers, and was actually surprised that it wasn’t worse. I had a good start, but a crummy finish to the week. My mental state was definitely not so good, I was restless and instead of stepping away from the keyboard, I talked myself into a series of trades that weren’t right.
I knew I was doing it, too, I can tell by reading my offline trading journal. Making up rules as I go along. A little success on one of those, so let’s do it again! Oh, that one went badly wrong, now I need to make up for it. And so on.
I’m adding a new metric, which is number of trades that were valid according to my trading plan. If a trade doesn’t have a screenshot and notes, then it wasn’t (because my trading plan includes rules on documentation, so if it’s not fully documented, it’s not according to plan. Last week, I had a day that I didn’t document - everything got into the spreadsheet, but not into the word doc where the screenshots and commentary go.
And hopefully, having to write down for each trade whether or not it was according to plan will serve as an incentive to stay on plan.
Oh, I tracked down the piece of… software that was causing Firefox to crash all the time. It is uninstalled and banished to the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. So all better now.
So, now some lackluster numbers!
Week ending 14/9/2018
Number of trades: 10
Positive trades: 6
Negative trades: 4
Success rate: 60%
Number of trades on plan: 2
Number of trades off plan: 8 (yes, I know!)
Average risk/return: -0.09
Average P/L per trade: -2 pips
% change in account equity: -0.05%
The two on plan trades for last week were both on Tuesday, Then it went downhill from there.
This week, I didn’t trade at all yesterday. I was watching, but conditions never lined up. So not trading was on plan.
Today one so far, the overall trend started to reverse while I was on it so I made a hasty exit with 5 pips. Looking at the chart an hour later, looks like that was a wise move. (But even if the market had gone the other way, it was still the right thing to do and ON PLAN.) I’m standing aside for the moment because the first screen tells me to.
Hey E, just thinking like DR Elder.
The Ever Practical VIPER
All pretty accurate, I’m afraid. Scattered all over the place because of this and that having nothing to do with trading, and as you pointed out, the markets don’t give a monkey’s.
So what I’ve been doing is getting on a trade with a stop loss, and then monitoring and deciding the exit. Are you saying that I’d be better off putting a take profit and then not touching it until one of those points triggers?
Or did I misunderstand?
I am indeed… sort of something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and have the time and opportunity now. Currently working on the Clementi Op 36, I’m only on the first one.
Hey E, yes a preset TP, look for a level, or maybe a tp vs stop, your stop depends on the fractal you are in, the current market conditions, IE are there long tails and wicks on the candles, and of course first of all your account size. Then look for a price 1.2 -2.0 / 1 RR. If you get the direction right on the majority of your trades, you have half of the battle. Don’t believe the “exit is the most important thing” nonsense, if you are of the wrong side from the beginning it will still be a losing trade, the exit determines how much you lose, but lose you will.
The Ever Coaching VIPER
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Thanks for your advice. I will change my practice.
I think you may have pinpointed the underlying cause of what went wrong last week. I’m not sure if I can articulate it very well, but I’ll try. I think I got overconfident after a good day on Tuesday, and started thinking that I was better than I am, and can manage my way out of a substandard trade. But as you say, you can’t. So that feeling led me off my plan, and then I kept trying to fix it the wrong way.
Maybe I’ll have a study day tomorrow.
When you start out trading you have to hone the basics, what could be more basic than a high probability entry, look at what we are doing on AlphaHavocs thread, we are showing him high probability entries, even if you stay too long, and make 5 pips, you had the direction right, you can work on the rest later.
The Ever Sharing VIPER
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"Just for educational purposes, I had a look at the Yuppy today using my system.
The result was:
On the first screen (1 hour chart) there’s an uptrend that got established about 4AM this morning BST, and is still happening at time of posting. So that means, look only for long trades. On the second screen (12 minute chart) there’s a buy signal that forms around 8:30 and lasts about an hour.
I don’t watch this pair normally, so this is all looking back, which is of course easy. But if I’d entered on that buy signal, I would have entered somewhere around 130.767, with a stop at 130.5 and take profit (I have those now, because Coach Viper says I should) at 131.214. Those numbers come from the envelopes centered on the 22 bar EMA, which are calibrated for Cable but on first glance seem reasonably ok for this pair too.
So I would have come out somewhere around 12:40 with the take profit.
Also I note that I wouldn’t have done what Viper did because the second screen wasn’t showing an opportunity then, in fact it was showing a short opportunity, but since there was still an uptrend on the 1 hour chart, you can only use that as a signal to exit a long trade, not enter a short trade.
Interesting exercise."
Hey E, a couple of things that we need to know about the Yuppy. First it is the dwelling place of a lot of Pro Speculators, if you doubt this FX.Com will confirm it. So we have to use what they use, it’s not about beating them, well not much anyway, its about duplicating, following in their footsteps as it were.
First, from what I remember, Dr. Elders triple screen was designed with futures in mind, so you may want to tweak it here and there to see if that adds some more clarity.
So what do we know about Pro’s, well they love them some 4 hr charts, and out side of the basic daily, to check range size and long term trend or range, 4 hr is tha shizzle. Then it breaks down to 1 hr, 15 min, 5 min, 100 ema, 50 ema, Stoch, MACD, ATR. Mostly it is the same stuff traders have been using for years.
So with this in mind I think the triple screen should be pretty robust, with some adjustments, even within pairs there are tweaks that can make or break a system, so we might have to adapt to these also.
The Ever Seeing Over The Horizon VIPER
Ahhh… Memories of studying the C Major sonatina still haunt me…and my sister (she also studied it)
…and my parents also , who had to endure us playing that one for hours and hours…
Every time I go home I play it , for my parents and old times’ sake…
I hope you enjoy it!
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Thanks for that. I noted that on your list the one that I’m not using at all is ATR, so I did some reading this morning on what it is and what it’s for. I think I can make use of it to help set my stops and targets, which is still a bit hazy and probably not optimal the way I’m doing it now.
So, putting ATR on the 12 minute chart seems a bit useless (except maybe to see whether volatility is increasing or decreasing) because the majority of my trades will last more that 12 minutes. Some will last more than an hour; the vast majority should be finished within 4 hours, so using the 4-hour ATR makes sense. (Is that why it’s tha shizzle? Or some completely other reason?)
So I’d take the current 4-hour ATR and place my stop that many pips away from the entry point, and the target the same in the other direction. A couple of mock-ups pass the sanity test for GBP/USD, but not really for EUR/JPY, it’s too wide there. Well, it appears to be too wide.
I’ll try it out next opportunity.
PS: I can’t help noticing that there are a few things not on that list. Namely, Fibonacci retracement levels and resistance/support levels.
Whilst it is good to learn about all the various tools available, it is not a good idea to clutter your screen with too many at the same time. Many indicators and tools will be trying to tell you the same thing in different ways and this can easily lead to the so-called “analysis paralysis” whereby there is always something saying “go” whilst something else says “not yet”.
A clearer approach is to establish first what do you actually need. I.e. something to tell you whether it is going up or down, something else maybe to measure momentum in the move, something else to maybe indicate when a move is overdone, and something to cover the problem of when to get out - both as a target and as a stop - and so on.
For each determined need you can then sift through the range of tools and decide which seems to work best for you. I am sure you will find in the end that you actually require very little to succeed.
In my very humble and dubious opinion, the biggest difficulty is with the last one - exits, and in particular for targets rather than stops. There is a huge amount of stuff on how to spot an entry but there is surprisingly, or rather not surprisingly, very little on how to optimise your profit takes. It is not easy to identify the end of a move but it is extremely easy to exit a trade prematurely, which does great damage to one’s equity management.
There are the typical target techniques such as a fixed pip value, trailing stops, psychological S/R levels (whole numbers), PA lines, ratios, Fibbonacci levels, MAs and many more. I think this is maybe the hardest area in which to select and build a strategy that works optimally and is often neglected for the very fact that it is difficult! (or maybe it is just difficult for me! )
Agreed! I like the KISS rule (Keep it Simple, Stupid!) The “Stupid” is basically a reminder that there are limits to the amounts of information that one can take in at the same time.
I have deep suspicions about Fib levels–or rather my ability to use them effectively (despite being named for the great Fibonacci)-- mainly because you can move them around subjectively. I’ve heard the argument that everyone uses them, so you should too. Maybe that has some merit, but anything I can move around until it looks good is not for me.
Similar feelings about support/resistance levels. They do exist, and there are good crowd psychology reasons why they do. However, my ability to accurately identify them is probably not good enough, and from what I’ve seen so far, the pro analysts that publish their opinions aren’t always right about it either.
I’ve noticed that! There’s a tendency to have an excruciatingly detailed technical discussion of choosing an entry, and then a sort of hand wavey brush off discussion of exits, usually with some conditionals which can more or less be summarised as “if it looks good, hang on, if it doesn’t, get out.” Which is right in there with “buy low, sell high” in terms of usefulness. Good advice, but no help on how to follow it.
I noticed that when I was working with the Cowabunga system, and I think I put it that the entries can be automated, but the exits can’t be. That suggests that it’s a highly skilled thing to do, hence, difficult. And probably a little bit of a black art as well. In other words, something that’s learned with experience.
But the fact remains that you can’t fix a bad trade with a good exit, so I’m trying to get on track with making sure I get on good trades. As with many things, the more I learn, the more I know I need to learn.
I would be astonished if it’s only difficult for you!
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Absolutely!..and isn’t that wonderful!
…And the best part is that with trading you really can “earn while your learn” 
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Well, once I let myself off monopoly money, which isn’t just yet. I don’t want to be “crash and burn while you learn” 
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