It’s so hard to hold a winner!
I’m so used to trading very short timeframes and taking fast profits.
On the shorter term timeframes the market primes you for taking profits early because it usually swings around (until it doesn’t).
It’s so difficult to do something different to where your practice lies!
I’ve taken off some profit and reduced the position size but it still irks me to see it there.
How do you all handle it?
I started listening to all those people whom I ignored for years, who were saying ‘Have targets and stick to your plan’ or ‘don’t micromanage’, and now I let the trades run until the target: if they reverse or continue beyond my target, then so be it…
The biggest killer to your trading is FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out: you will always have more opportunities tomorrow, so be happy that you are not losing money each day, and that you are catching a proportion of the moves…
Rules and practice and discipline. I have a pre-set chart pattern that will cause me to jump out of a winning position and I know the pattern even before I enter the trade. Its basically a daily close the wrong side of the 9EMA. This inherently means not getting out at a profitable extreme high when long/low when short. But it doesn’t matter about giving some profit back - that money was never mine so its not lost, its still waiting in the market for me and I will be able to place an order tomorrow to get back into another position that just might run even further.
Running 100m and running a marathon… it’s just running isn’t it? Different skills needed and one is more suited to some than to others but with practice you can improve at both.
People hate uncertainty and will do all kinds of things both positive and negative to avoid it hence we rather take the small win now than deal with the uncertainty that the trade might not hit it’s target.
The market is going to do what it’s going to do regardless of your intervention. If you have taken the trade according to your criteria and there are no major significant changes, keep out of your own way and let the trade do its thing. You need the eventual winners to be “whole”, to offset the losers and give you a profit.
Always good to remember that the individual trade is not that important and that the strategy’s expectancy is what counts.
Distract yourself by working on something else or doing other things.
Wise man once said “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”. Maybe that applies here. But also remember noise to some is sweet music to others.
That noise is a siren call to me.
I’m finding the same his week… after a few weeks of smashing it… from Tuesday onward absolute waste of time.
Thought I’d have a try trading using stops again… only to watch the market move from one stop to the next with sniper precision… to accurate to be for real… So back to hedging which contained the losses. No wonder newbies get cleaned out…
Had to turn Bots off as they effectively were working in reverse… great algo from the LP’s. Market too choppy to use Cross Over strategy and Heiken Ashi changing colour every 15 minutes… Obviously my strategies are crap in a ranging market.
Even tried scalping the 5min just to reclaim some profits…market gives 2 candles and takes it all away plus some in the third… XAUUSD chart looks as choppy as AUDUSD…spreads all over the place. Must be a profit taking week for Brokers and Liquidity Providers a like…“Cease and Desist” is the best strategy for the rest of the week… sceptical as usual…
W.to the Jungle…
I have to agree, for USD at least, it was a mixed week, full of false starts and stops…I imagine
the Majors will all have had some problems if the USD has been pretty much stationary…
This sentence should be burned into the brain of all new traders. And for struggling traders this one simple notion really can turn everything around.
I cannot agree more that was so hard for me when I did trade forex spot.
It is so much easier said than done! Perhaps this is the most struggling part of trading especially for newbies. If you manage to discipline your mind, the rest will run much smoother but as almost everything in trading, it’s strictly individual.