Trading for a Living

Thats precisely the point. And you have put it so well. Entry, exit etc are so very important. But if we are not a mech trader, how many times have we faced the situation? Ah, volumes seem to be less, will it go up, no it may come back. lets wait for some time more. Asian markets are down, so how will India go up? there will be a pullback soon.

So even with your best entry and exit plan, we will have to have discipline to execute it! They are all pieces of a jigsaw. Till all of them don't come together, the puzzle remains incomplete, whatever we may think.

Rightly paraphrased ,forget the world ,it is i & my signals, if it is a Buy/Sell do that only.Never heed any damn thing.

easy to say, but almost difficult to do....I just missed a long in rcomm because of self doubt

Well if you had put in a buy stop, you may not have!

Hi Ratan,

From your posts,I had gathered that you were a mechanical trader.....I could be wrong.But if you are,and your system tells you a Buy,then there is nothing else to do ............a Buy it is.

There is no YOU there,let alone self doubt......it's a Buy,if it's a Buy. A Sell if it's a Sell.And you take all signals as per your plan and your system.

After you have done all the preliminary testing,follow the system.No mind usage.No second guessing the system.No self doubt.

It isn't difficult......imagine you were a Robot carrying out orders as programmed.

Saint

Dear Saint,

I am on the way to being completely mechanical....almost there

And u are right a buy is a buy....and I like the " there is no u there "

Thats what I am working towards.....

Hopefully, such missed trades will be a thing of the past

An article ,exactly articulating me :
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Mental Fitness for Futures Traders
by Norman Hallett, former CTA/Trader

It’s why we all signed up for the battle against the markets. In the beginning, we read an article or saw a sales leaflet about a guy who took his last few dollars and parlayed it into millions in the futures markets.

It usually involved a simple secret that when revealed to you (for a few hundred dollars), you could have the same success. Most of the time, we would chuck the article/leaflet into the trash as garbage, but at some low ebb in our psyche, the article read like the answer to our prayers. Most of us joined the fray for the “big hit”.

Whether we 1-2-3-counted with Ken Roberts, waved with Prechter, or seasoned with Bernstein, we all soon realized that if we were going to stay in the game, we needed something more than desire and a dream… we needed a back-tested system that we could have confidence in. We realized that we needed to take our emotions out of trading and look at trading like a professional… like a job.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have fun, because winning traders enjoy their jobs like no others. So, we either adopted a guru, inspected his archives of trades (that’s back-testing, right?) and watched him/her live for a while before jumping in, or we bought software to test a system we thought could work.

Our system in hand, we saddle up to the computer. We have stops to defend against losing too much in one trade and we have limits to make sure we take our profits when our system tells us to. After a mix of trades over the first few weeks, we hit on a big one.

The news confirms that we are geniuses and we are quickly heading to our profit target. In fact, we’re just ticks away. Hey, this heat wave is bigger than anyone expected. There’s no way beans are not going to the teens! “I’ll lift my limit and keep my eye on it.” Market closes a 5 cents above the (former) profit target. “I’m getting good at this. I’m really developing a market ‘sense’.”

You decide you’ll put a stop right at your (former) profit target, so that if the market backs off, you’ll take your profit where you were going to anyway. (OK, reader, you know what’s coming). Rain in the plains overnight. Soybeans open 26 lower. Stopped out. Your genius turned a nice winner into a nice loser. What happened? The same thing that happened when you read that original ad that got you involved in all of this… You let your emotions take over.

If you’re still trading after a few years, it either means you have very deep pockets or you’ve learned to control your emotions and take every profit your system tells you to. You’re going to need them to overcome all the losses… and become the winner you know you can be.
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Just missed a trade yesterday in BILT Fut,my system gave a sell signal @ 120.45 ,but became hesitant (becoz was trading above Resistance with huge vol),though a quick wave count on EOD showed 4th wave completed and 5th down unfolding (means Short),still strong price vol upmove in intraday chart ,parallyzed me to initiate the short trade.
When will i become profficient ?

Asish

Hi Asish,

The fact that you have recognised that you have missed a signal due to self doubt itself is a move in the right direction.

Most traders just blame things when they miss trades or make bad trades......

Evolving super traders accept that they have made a mistake and take steps to correct it next time.

Best of luck

Ratan Noora Sir Howz U

SAB MAJA MAIN CHE

But this could have happened even before the prices reached the profit target. Isn't there a logical fallacy here (one of association/correlation)?

The passage could however be a nice illustration of the virtues of day-trading (of not carrying risks overnight) or the limitation of stop-losses in risk mitigation.

Regards,
Kalyan.