Thursday, January 22, 2009

Building Success

I sometimes have very ambitious goals with my trading and that makes me neglect certain setups just because they are not so "grand." That is totally stupid. I think that success comes from building on the small and simple strategies that work for oneself.
Imitate while you learn. Innovate when you become yourself.
I like the work that Tyler is doing with his trading.

6 comments:

OONR7 said...

I agree... and I think Tyler's doing a great job of breaking down very good setups.

Tyler said...

Anarco,

Thanks for the shout out! That means a lot to me.

I realized the other day that my trading was getting sloppy. I was not focusing on the bigger picture, but only the current candle and it was eating into my profits big time.

I decided to go through our trades (mine and my brother's) to see what was happening. I found that I had 25 trades with 9 losers and Tanner had only 12 trades with only 2 losers. This doesn't look that bad, but my losers took away over half the profits I could have had and only took away 10% of Tanner's.

Most of my losses were sloppy trades with no prior analysis of the setup. I decided that I will stay focused on a couple of setups and ONLY trade those. I am going to miss a lot, but the ones I get should be good. Also, when I saw that we would currently be at 200% of our monthly goal had it not been for my bad trading it really got me thinking that I need to simplify.

Thanks again,
Tyler

anarco said...

That is very interesting Tyler.
I observed that trading bad setups has three issues:

1. The most obvious is that the percentage of winners go down and so profits also go down. Not good.

2. When one enters a bad setup, one is committed to monitoring that trade, and that takes away focus. So one ends up using one's time to monitoring a bad setup and misses out on other "good" setups.

3. It develops bad habits. Not good.

So I am also trying to simplify and be more effective at selecting good setups.

Cheers,

Anonymous said...

you guys are so right! depressing to waste emotional capital on a bad trade, and instead of trading what i see, i tend to be prejudiced by my POS position... when i review the charts on those trades, invariably im managing the damage, like selling to cut loses right at the perfect point to go long... all the while, decent set-ups fly right by me b/c im f-ed in the head and steaming at myself. i have trouble letting go of stupid trades...

QQQBall said...

sorry, that last little gem is mine :0
i hit "anon" - sorry

anarco said...

Letting go of bad trades is also my Achilles heel.