Loser 2 Winner

Hi,

For those who have made it or near making it in trading what changed it for you to make you profitable?

Thanks.

Developing a system that is quantifiable and repeatable. A system that tells me when not to trade as much as it does when to. A system that tells me when to exit despite setting a stop and a system that doesn’t care what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow, doesn’t care about news releases.

The main change in my mind was wanting to automate the system and not have to watch the screen all day - once you have to tell a computer to trade you have to be very specific in your system and how it is applied. Going the quantifiable route forced me to investigate indicators and to get them working the way I needed.

The other important change in mindset was deciding to never hold a position overnight, to finish the day positions closed to minimise risk in low liquidity and potential impact of dawn raids, this affected when trades can be taken.

The key revelation overall was realising that I don’t need to call tops and bottoms, just grab some of the ‘wave’. Also the observation that price moves with momentum, trend or no trend. No momentum equals no moves so no opportunity to trade and profit. This led to extensive research on detecting and measuring gathering momentum in the markets.

Finally the understanding that no real money is consistently made on a small account meant I had to aim to manage other people’s money - appreciating such a responsibility forced me to be very disciplined about my claims and findings and to do lots of work on distinguishing higher probability setups and reducing prevailing risk.