It has been a week since i’ve turned my system into a bussines and a lot of things happened since then.
After adding a trading routing ans a step by step guide I’ve realized that i was tired most of times and it is really difficult to find a great trading set up following my system, i mean, before it i was trading blindfold without knowing how was I in that moment, i mean, i have a BIG journal with trades with no real emotional evaluation. Yesterday i’ve opened a trade according to my system and it is much different as i was thought that it would behave, i mean, for example, with BOE interest rates report normally any gbp besed pair falls because the rate remains unchanged, but the last two reports were quite different, the gbp based pairs raised and i assumed this thursday might do the same but yesterday gbpjpy showed a BIG red canddle with big chances of breaking support line and added with fundamentals my systems gives me a big chance to bear. I can be wrong with this but it doe not matter, sl will come to help me. The point here is having a system will help you to trade what you see not what you think.
This is just crazy!!! Last week I ended the week with a profit after years of doing this and this week almost all my account is gone again!! (pulling hair out).
For some reason I lost all self control and discipline this week every time I think I figure the market out it pulls me for a loop and I lose money.
I keep blaming capitalism and the rich snobs who control the market to profit from the little guys like us but its really my fault in the end as I have the choice not to execute trades and sit back, not get greedy and just take little money but its so hard controlling these emotions consistantly so that I can profit regularly and possibly make a living doing this.
my system is still developing i think, two days ago euro usd broke major resistance and sold but then the markets rallied a bit the following day which made me switch from bear to bull in the span of one day.
this really ruined my account because instead of accepting my system i decided to scalp against the trend to make money because i was greedy, obssessed, arrogant, now today 70 percent of my account is gone i don’t know what to do im angry i want to give up.
Yeah, you have read well the title. It is a fact and you must accept it. But it does not mean you have to change your system, you must accept it is an eternal fight like an addiction you wanna overcome, like a dicease you must carry on for the rest of your life. Let’s put this way, you have a son or dsughter, if not imagine you have one. The point is your boy is a little problematic at school, maybe his academic perfomance realy sucks. Whatever the cause is or whatever you do to encourage or punish this kid. You everything but, do you change your boy? I guess not, so your system is your little boy, when is newborn it makes you wake up at night every hour, it trhrows you semlling pooh to your face and so on. Do you change your baby because of the nasty diper bombs? I guess not. So if your system is logical to you, and you do it independantly the only thing you must do is follow it.
Something i did not notice about my system wich now is not a little baby, maybe a teenager is i cannot do it by night, i mean i can but i am too dam tired that i end up biasing somethig that must not be biased. I mean i will not switch the routine, exercise and sleeping i will do it by night but the trading routine i’ll do it by daylight when i feel cool, in trading fit otherwise i’ won’t be able to trade in alpha state.
Today i was about to start the same ole theatre with my wife, said some nasty (but not so nasty) words to her, i was f******* tired and i did not realized about it. It was a mistake and we all make mistakes always. To avoid making a bigger trouble i’ve just moved on, started my chronograph and sit to wait until it fades. Belive me when you overcome something like this you feel invincible, try not to feel too invincible, that is bad too.
That makes a lot of sense I make my best trades when I don’t have any personal emotional triggers at home like wanting to beat my wife when she makes me angry ( I have never touched her as I don’t want to go to prison) but they are very dangerous side effects to my trading account.
As of now I am almost close to adding more money to the account and becoming poorer but I have learned a lot again this is my fifth or sixth fill up of my account I think.
Hopefully this one will be the last I must remember to trade when I am alpha in the brain with no emotional side effects to make optimal trades this time, this is most likely in the early morning when she is asleep and I have just awoken and my brain is in tact. When I am tired and abused emotionally at home I am become erratic and lose my money I must remember to step away when this happens.
Au Contraire what people belives, when you think trading sucks you must star seeing things in different ways. After you implemented a system, like a step by step task and you decide to follow it no matter what. You´ll begin to notice something weird, that becomes harder and less funny. Well trading is not supposed to be funny nor boring. Let me put this way, market labor is a very difficult area, it is not easy to find a job, it is more difficult to find something related to what you have studied. Let´s say you graduated with honor from MIT, and you are an electric engineer like me. Well, let´s say after jumping from one job to another, finally you start working t the electric power company, wo hoo!!! you make big money but with time the work you do becomes boring, somehow you don´t wanna work anymore, you search for any excuse for not working, it happens all the time. But this feeling comes and go and you manage to do your job. Why? Because you studied for it, you receive a salary, you have the pressure of being fired, you have a boss, you have a routine. And so on.
So the same with trading, it will suck time to time, you cannot quit your job just like that, your job makes you feel unhappy sometimes? Well, trading will do. THe only difference is you are the boss and is your capital in risk and is under your rules. At work you might have some strict rules that you cannot change at your will, you must behave like that with trading, not changing the system just because you don´t like it.
I really don´t like use uniform at work but i must, and so i don´t like the rule of three loses maximum but i do follow it. I´ve impossed to miself to prevent reckless and impulsive trading.
Agree trading is like a new job it is impressive in the beginning and then slowly you find out your co-workers are a******s like Dwight Schrute, someone else is capitalizing from the product of your labors, the system is corrupt, people are out to get you, before you know it you breakdown and quit the terror of hell.
Trading shares some similarities it is impressive in the beginning be your own boss, work your own hours, make a lot of money but then slowly you realize the Rich capitalists make all the money, you are forced to be a vulture looking for scraps (scalping), it is corrupt in that scammers and swindlers prey on new traders for money, a lot of money and time is required to learn like earning a college degree, the stress makes you breakdown and want to quit hell.
My account is depleted again for the fifth or sixth time and I am considering replenishing it with my hard earned money maybe I am naive, masochist for financial exploitation, stupid, or have good instincts and believe in the promise of wealth and happiness in the end, I am hoping for the latter as I contemplate putting in more money.
One more thing I have been told by a ‘professional trader’ that trading is 80 percent psychology, controlling emotions, discipline and 20 percent Technicals and Fundamentals.
This may be true because I think I may have a good grasp on the math but because I’m desperate in poverty I am forced into emotional high risk trades which ruin me financially.
Maybe this I will lower my risk tolerance or get lucky where I have make enough capital and not feel I must be forced into high risk trades for reasonable returns to fit my lifestyle.
Well, trading is not easy. And in your case, we all been through it. The big (but not only) step begins when we decided to use SL propperly, not risking more than 1% per trade and trading in bigger time frames. Your first step is to accept the loses little by little, if SL has to activate so be it, let the market take a piece of your account but not the entire account in just one move. Let me put this way: have you ever watched “Tropa de Elite” (Elite Troops)? is brazilian movie about the military police in Rio de Janeiro, dedicated and specialized off drug dealers neutralization, they are up the level of mossad. Anyway, the first middle of trainig consists only in psicological pressure and bulling, they don’t want weak people who cannot handle the pressure, one mistake and they can be killed in action. So, learn to accept a large serie of loss, but little by little, in controlled loses, never expose your account, never.
The analisys is a tool that helps us to have a certain advantage among the others but what advantage do you have if everyone uses the same indicators? It is said that hte best aproach is price action, suport an resistance lines and other price acion based systems but the obvious is missing. Yeah, if you had read babypis school or another course you might not remember what a dioji or a morning star is. Yes, it is difficult to trade with candle patterns but is the first thing you must learn to do but we ignore that basic tool. So if the big majority of traders they simple ignore it, it would not give you a little advantage among the others if you learn it?
Let put this way, at university i had to study a lot of b******t like calculus, integrals and so on wich works for nothing in the real world but helped me to understand the theory behind. So if you think about it, forex is a serious career and i think it should be trated like one, you must learn and study all related to forex and then discard what you don’t need.
You have made your analisys and pulled the trigger, be optimistic but not with the result of that trading, that is biasing and you will end up seeking for anything to justify the already taken trade. Instead you must be neutral about that single result but optimistic about your behavior towards the trade. Be confident you will be cool whe it closes no matter if it loses, remember anything can happen. So when you have pulled the trigger to avoid the emotional shock when you lose or the irrational uphoria when you not, mentalize both situations, first when it wins, imagine a BIG candle activationg take profit, your heart will start bumping and then imagine youself in a clam place like rowing in a boat; the same when it does lose, imagine a big candle activating stop loss, your heart will explode and then imagine yourself in the same quiet situation. Try this exercise and you will notice the power of your own mind over your body. With this technique you can supress and control any irrational emotional extreme, wich in both cases are bad for you and your trading.
The bottom line: Remain neutral about every single trade but remain optimistic about your behavior on closing and the overall results.
Last year at the beginings of this one i have made woo hoo dolars with GBP Interest Report. It is said when a number such as Interest Rate is equal to consensus it is bearish to that particular currency. Well that was true until i hadtwo loses with that report. Ok what is going on. Then i started to think, maybe last year was bad for England and now optimistic conditions are set so ne next Interest Report most likely will remain unchanged but GBP will bull for two reasons, the last two reports before it bulled and it is uprising time for England and mixed with other factors i have made my analisis and woialá, yesterday my position has closed by Take Profit, something that happens not quite often, so i proved my theory, but just like the article above, it is not the ultimately truth.
It is like science in that there is trial and error but these errors are expensive. The experiments are hurtful to my emotions many times for example I traded using risk on risk off meaning when equities were risk on there would be dollar weakness and not dollar strength however this past week I lost a lot of money as we have seen considerable dollar strength despite strong equity performance in the American stock market.
This has ruined my system it is no longer relevant now that the US dollar continues to strengthen I have no scientific evidence as to why I should buy into it any longer therefore I can’t enter a long position because there are no exit strategy.
The life of a FOREX trader can cause ulcers my emotions are ruined again as I looking for another scientific system.
Well, let´s say you wanna study Lions over their natural environment. Let´s say you make a statistic study about how they tend to behave. Thay have a very high probability to do certain things after certain events but it does not mean it will be the same every time th event occurs but your study determines that is the most likely behave to expect to be observed. Yet it is an statistic estimation but based on a scientific observation, watch, hypothesis, and so on. Even exact sciences like physics gor example, the formulas works only under certain conditions, i am an electric engineer, i can tell you that ohm´s law only work under certain contidions, V=RI, if a voltage is applied to a resistor a current will pass trough the resistor and it will be a linear proportion betweein V and I until the voltage is too high and the behave is no more like the formula. Just like heating water, the higher the temperature the bigger the thermical dilatation but when boiling point is reached, water does not expands anymore.
The same in trading, you can stadisticly determine when an event x occurs the y pair will do determined movement, but you must accept it will not happen every time, maybe x ocurred under a different circumstance. In fact any system you develop or copy it does not matter, will only have less than 40% to get winning trades, that is why a system must be combined with patience, discipline and the famous 1:3 ratio, with that magic number you only need to be right 30% of times to be break even. Just trade bindly following your system and forget about money even if your are trading with real funds. Get off money obsession.
Ulcers are a bacterial infection, stress can reduce your immune system’s ability to fight the infection but cannot cause them.
From your other posts you have yet to have a system fail. You have failed your systems. When you have developed a more dispassionate way to trade then another scientific system may help you.
Query for you Mr Gone, i am ready to go live with the strategy im working on, im confident that i have something that works for me, and i spent a few hours this morning at the london live watching the charts (took time off work), so im at that point i need to trade live. So im going to take a morning off work and just trades with micro lots (in as small a size as i can get) and see how i get on, if im in profit, by the end of my 4 hour trading session i know im doing something right and more testing needs to be done.
Is it normal that i feel a little nervous about doing this? I guess my main concern is that if i fail, but i know if i follow my rules i will be fine.
This morning i didnt see any spots between 0900 - 1100 but as soon as i start work, im seeing lots of them lol.
I think i just need to get in the zone before my first live trading session, what do you think? The routine?
Indeed, in fact i still get nervous sometimes, the difference between now and then, now i have a system, indicator fundamental or star based it does not matter, if i get nervous i don’t follow my instinct i follow my system. If my guts tells me strongly buy buy buy but the system tell me sell, i just sell, just like that, i blindly trust in my system. The system does not supress emotions but get em out of the ecuation.
Try this excercise, once you open your live account and your funds are on it, keep tradin on demo at least one more month. With that you will feel desperate to do it live belive me, learn to supress that feeling. So after doing that and whe you begin life i guarantee you the first trade will be a loss, accept it and move on, in fact most traders when switch to live the do it when they are overconfident and when market conditions change and of course loses in live are more painful. Once you can operate with no rush and overcome the obsession for money one ineteresting thing will happen, when you go back to demo and have a loss, that loss feels just like the life one or even worse, that is a good thing, it means you can take live or demo as the same.
