I found that trading didn’t work very well for me when I was very busy during the last 6 days I was out of town. I traded only once out of these 6 days. I read portions of data, and viewed very few videos.
Well, it was the first time I was extremely busy ever since I began trading. I spent all afternoons at the garage. I had a tough time concentrating on trading there.
I even wondered how traders, who both work and trade manage properly. I now appreciate the fact that I have the full days of trading. I don’t wanna take things for granted. I spend lots of time at home. I must do better than if I were working. One has to experience something to make meaning of something valuable like time. I’m truly grateful.
The trick is to find a strategy that is sustainable with your current or desired lifestyle.
No point trying to learn to scalp the US session if you live in Australia and don’t want to be sleeping all day and awake all night.
One of the main benefits to trading is that unlike what we are taught growing up - it is not necessarily the harder and more time you ‘trade’ for, the more money you make.
Personally I now trade 1-2 hours a day and make the same if not more than when I would spend 10-12 hours a day on the chart.
I also found that by forcing myself to spend less time trading it made me more selective with the trades I would take and I wouldn’t ‘force’ as many trades as I felt like I had to be doing something.
I guess I am trying to say use your lack of time as an advantage to develop a strategy that doesn’t require a lot of time to be profitable.
But in the learning stages use as much time as you can to backtest, forward test, document and review your processes.
Thanks for sharing. I agree with you. Your points though different are great
I love them. I equally don’t believe in lots of trading hours. But, the point I was putting across was that it’s crazy to trade when one is really exhausted and very busy. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to trade while exhausted and busy. It’s pointless. I missed huge TPs, which came after the automated ones. If I had enough time to observe my trade, I wouldn’t have missed those TPs.
I have to agree with you here. It took me over a decade to realize that my desire for long term investment and my desire for short term trading are just two different elements of the same desired outcome. I still do a lot of technical analysis and charting for setups, but I currently enter about once per week or less frequently. A few years ago, I was trying to make profit entering trades ten times per day. All that generated was a pretty accurate estimate of an expectancy close to zero (and negative). I needed to slow down about a 100 fold. I have managed to do that (I put that down to psychology and willingness to change strategy and approach when a previous strategy had been shown to be loss making). I feel the excitement, but I now have patience to wait till the setups are higher probability before I pull the trigger.
You are right. I’m not just in the right mind frame. Tomorrow, I rush out of town again to the courts. So, I just put it on hold. It has to wait for me. I’m cool with that. I will see if there is a way to put in a long time trade.
Hi Mupo,
It is strange how it dawned on me what my problem was with Forex. I knew we were very comfortable with long term investments - gosh we have been accumulating gold since 1988. I had always viewed Forex as a way of making “dramatic returns” but realized two things late in our investment lives:
1 We do not need dramatic returns. Anything over 5% per year can be thought to be acceptable. Certainly 10% to 15% per year will perpetuate what I refer to as “the life of Riley”.
2 Though I set stop losses religiously and accepted the leveraged result I always felt “robbed” when stopped out of a position. I realized that a non-leveraged activity would eradicate my feeling of “being robbed” even though it may turn out that I lose 100% of value of any particular investment or trade. The fact is a year of unleveraged trades has resulted in better annual profits than our entire 30+ years of investment history. So now I just continue what we are doing on the unleveraged side, and assign a small fraction of those funds to go back to leveraged trading starting with 2:1 leverage, measuring expectancy to ensure there is a positive edge, and slowly working up the leverage ratio (if indeed desirable) as I continue to trade. Time will tell, but it starts from a winning position, which is so much more acceptable than starting from a losing position.
Hi Mupo,
I do not have a proposal. What works for me at 65 years old will almost certainly not work for you being so much younger. The key take away from this should be that anyone contemplating making Forex (or leveraged trading of any sort) part of their lives that will affect the outcome of their efforts in a positive manner may wish to contemplate on how much their acceptance or rejection of high leverage will impact their outcomes.
Over the next few months, it is my intention to be able to create some simple EA scripts to backtest what I have been doing manually, then to determine at what level of leverage those decisions may have resulted in reaching stop loss. Since I currently trade with no leverage whatsoever, that would be represented by an asset that would decline to zero value. That has not happened yet with my Crypto decisions, but like stocks it is entirely possible (and probable) that this will happen in the future, so I maintain it is always better to use leverage for risk management than not at all.
I’m almost whispering to you, “Trading without leverage may be a miracle.” It would be interesting to see how that works . . . Hey, by the way, I’m not young. This year, I will be 50yrs.
You are all right. I have to graduate from being an hourly trader to a weekly or monthly trader. I’m actually in transit right now as I type this message.
I trade and have a second job as well, and balancing both isn’t difficult if you choose the right trading strategies and style. For a long time I was only trading after hours, something even you can look into if time is an issue.
Of course it’s possible to trade and work at your primary workplace, however I guess it’s quite difficult to switch between two or more activities. Human’s brain is able to endure such loads, but it may cause bad consequences I think. There should be a well-set scheme which will not bring any harm to your physical and mental health. To my mind the best thing is long-time trading or investing, any of these options will suit for those who plan to combine job and trading activity. And, of course, as yu mentioned, trader must have a strategy which will wrun like clockwork, because he/she won’t have much time to edit it or change at all.