From my trading blog:
I screwed up today. I had a good compression signal on the GBPCAD, and I had the price bracketed. But then I went with the GBPUSD instead at the last minute, canceling my GBPCAD order.
I told myself that I was taking the less than ideal setup because of the lower spread, but the truth is that I was just impatient, and the GBPUSD was moving more swiftly in what I thought would be the direction of the breakout.
Needless to say, the price reversed and I lost money on the GBPUSD, while my GBPCAD position would have been a win.
I knew the rules. I saw the setup. And I ignored it all. The justifications don’t really matter; this was ultimately a failure of discipline. This was a personal failure, not a system failure.
People write about the need for discipline in trading, but you don’t really understand it until you are there, in the moment. It’s not even really about greed, or fear. It’s about the desire for closure. To have it done. If you are going to be in, you want to be in now. It’s the waiting that gets you.
I need to be stronger. This is not about me, or what I feel. This is about building something better for the people that I love, the people that depend on me. I need to be utterly ruthless with myself when making these trades.
“If you can wait and not be tired by waiting… Yours is the world, and everything that’s in it”
My blog is set to private; it’s a learning journal for me and not for public consumption. But this morning was a rough morning for the reasons I set out. I feel like I’m at this place where my system is mostly working, and the failures I experience are personal ones. I need to fix that.
So I went out and I bought Trading in the Zone. It seems to be the most highly recommended book on Trading Psychology, and I can see why. But damn, reading it hurts. I can’t get through more than a few pages at a time before I need to put it down. Too. Much. Truth.
We all start by looking for a system that works, and it feels like half the posts on this forum are asking ‘that question’ while the other half are trying to sell answers. But I feel like I’m on a slightly different part of the journey. Anyone have any advice on getting to the other side of this?