My Trade Journal

[VJAY]

Again a bad day....more than loss day I made 1 wrong trade(2nd long trade) that';s making unhappy.I must trade perfect this type lossing ,whipping days which make loss.
small cap making noises in mind

 

[VJAY]

Market Truths ...shared by Amitrandive

The market doesn’t care if you’re a bear or a bull. It doesn’t care if you think it’s oversold or undervalued. It doesn’t care about your fundamental analysis or your charting skills. The market will do what the market will do, with or without you. You are not in control.

Accept It
One of the worst things you can do is a trader is to start to feel like you’ve lost control of the market. You should never feel that way because you never had control in the first place. You can have all the indicators in the world telling you to buy only to enter the trade and have it immediately go against you. Accept it, you are not in control.

Ego
Sometimes you let your ego get the best of you. It happens to the best of us. You make a few great trades and you feel like you’re running the market. Inevitably though, the market will give you a brutal lesson in humility. It is up to you whether or not you get your ego back in check and persevere. Always remember, you are not in control.

What Can You Control?
The only thing you can control is yourself. You can not control the market, but more importantly, the market can not control you. Only you control when you enter and exit the market.

Entry
You control your entry. The market can not pull you into a trade. As much as it seems like a stock is screaming at you to make a trade, it can not pull the trigger for you. You enter when your predetermined entry criteria have been met, not when the market tells you to. Now, you are in control.

Exit
You know the saying “plan the trade and trade the plan,” and that includes a planned exit on a failed trade. You have spent countless hours honing your trading skills. You know the set-ups you are looking for and you enter trades based on these set-ups. If that set-up fails, you have to punch the eject button. You take the loss and you move on. Losing is a part of trading; accept it. Once again, you are in control.

The market doesn’t care about you. It will exist whether or not you do. On the other hand, as a trader, without the market you are nothing. You are essentially a parasite and the market is your gracious host. A host organism will learn to fight off and destroy harmful parasites, but it will allow useful ones to coexist.

Learn to accept what you can and can’t control and harmonize with your host and you will have a long and happy life of day trading.

 

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Learning Options

Learning Options

 

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What does it take to be a good trader? ...nice post by oilman

Discipline.
Sounds simple, yet it is the greatest failing of people who lose in the stock market. Successful traders realize that they will not be right all the time. Many successful traders are profitable on less than half their trades. Given these losing facts, the reason winners make money is because they cut losses short and let profits run. They have the discipline to hit the eject button when they are proven wrong.

Fear of taking a loss or fear of missing out on an uptrend cause many market participants to hang on to losing positions. So often, these traders tell themselves that they will sell when the stock falls to a certain point but cannot execute.
When you take a position in a stock, you have to establish the point that the market will prove you wrong. Whether you choose to base that point on support and resistance levels, or the announcement of news, this point must protect bad outcome of your trading decision. If triggered, the exit sign is flashing. Head for the door.

otherwise, it will likely make a potentially small loss
grow into a big one. -so it also ties up capital. And it will take more profits to recover.
Second, it will create fear for the trader who is seeing profit and does not want to feel the pain of a loss again. To avoid the potential disappointment of another loss, some traders take profits too early simply to lock in the good feeling that comes with making a win.
Unfortunately, to be a successful trader you have to limit losses and let profits
run.

Maintaining discipline when trading is essential for success. If you have it, only simple rules of trading are necessary for success
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[VJAY]

The Fundamental Truths of Trading - Edited excerpt
Shared by DSM

“Trading in the Zone” Is a bible in the trading world written by Mark Douglas. Some principals :

Anything can happen – expect only that something will. The market will move or express itself in some way. At any time of any day something may happen that will have an adverse effect on the behaviour of the markets. Whether it’s a news release, natural disaster or big trader reversing a position, you need to be at peace with the reality that at any time, anything can happen in the markets. Nobody knows what will happen. All we know for sure is something will.

I don’t need to know what is going to happen next to make money
Just because we can’t know for sure if the market will go up or down, it doesn’t mean we can’t make money. Why? Because successful traders put the probabilities in their favour.

The odds are in my favour before I put on a trade; based on the market’s past behaviour the odds are good or at least acceptable of it moving in the direction of my trade. If you create a trading system (model) that has an “edge” over the market, then executing your trading plan with discipline gives you the best chance of keeping the odds in your favour. All I can lose is what it’ll cost me to find out if the trade is going to work. A loss is purely the cost of doing business – the amount of money I need to spend to make myself available for winning trades.

If you manage your risk effectively, all you can lose is the cost of finding out if your trade will be a winner. One of the costs of doing business for a restaurant owner is buying food. For a trader, spending money on losing trades, to ensure you’re there for the winners, is your cost of doing business.

There’s a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge; every loss puts me closer to a win.
This means it’s impossible to know which trades will win and which will lose. If your trading model wins 6 out of every 10 trades, you can never know which of those 10 trades will be winners or losers before you put them on. So even if your first 4 trades are losers, you should continue to trade the model with confidence. If the model’s working, your winning trades are coming.

An edge is nothing more than a higher probability of one thing happening over another. It’s not about being right, avoiding being wrong or proving anything. It’s about listening to the market when it tells me when my edge isn’t working or it’s time to take profits. Completely accept what the market is offering and wait for my next edge.Understand that just because you’ve had a few winners, it doesn’t mean you were right. It simply means the probability was in your favour…or you were lucky. Conversely, a string of losing trades (within parameters) doesn’t mean you were wrong, it’s simply part of the reality of trading. Losing trades are unavoidable.

Every moment in the market is unique.If you win a trade and the next setup (eg. price pattern) looks identical, it doesn’t mean it will win too. Every trade has a 50:50 chance of winning or losing. It’s only when you batch trades together that you demonstrate an edge over the market – a higher probability of winning over a number of trades.

Get intimate with these fundamental truths and ensure you understand the reality of trading…not just what your emotions might lead you to believe is happening…