A year ago, I read a thread by downrivertrader which said the most important thing in trading was to trust your instinct. At the time I was trading simple S/R, pretty badly it had to be said, so I thought why not? I decided on a 1:1 R/R (in fact, slightly less than 1R to account for spread) and I would trade whenever my gut instinct told me to. Screw the rules.
I lost 10 trades in a row. The odds of that happening are less than 1 in a 1000. I was shocked and annoyed for a day or two (live account) before I realised how important a lesson that was. We are hardwired to screw trading up. I wanted to know why.
Why do losers lose? It’s a simple question, but to find the answers hasn’t been easy. Ignore the Mark Douglas bullsh*t, ignore the threads of why 95% of people lose (all guesswork and seriously uninformed), and to find the truth you’ve got to collate and analyse thousands of hours of Oanda open interest data, dozens of academic papers on retail order flow and combine with a dollop of lateral thinking.
The results are a mixture of the surprising and obvious. Some things I won’t reveal here, but the thrust of what’s important I will. And why? Simple really. By revealing what you know, it only encourages you to get to the next level, so it’s a mostly selfish endeavour . I’ve only very recently come to this conclusion; I always swore I’d never share any of this, so take it while you can. Before I do though…
I lost 10 trades in a row. The odds of that happening are less than 1 in a 1000. I was shocked and annoyed for a day or two (live account) before I realised how important a lesson that was. We are hardwired to screw trading up. I wanted to know why.
Why do losers lose? It’s a simple question, but to find the answers hasn’t been easy. Ignore the Mark Douglas bullsh*t, ignore the threads of why 95% of people lose (all guesswork and seriously uninformed), and to find the truth you’ve got to collate and analyse thousands of hours of Oanda open interest data, dozens of academic papers on retail order flow and combine with a dollop of lateral thinking.
The results are a mixture of the surprising and obvious. Some things I won’t reveal here, but the thrust of what’s important I will. And why? Simple really. By revealing what you know, it only encourages you to get to the next level, so it’s a mostly selfish endeavour . I’ve only very recently come to this conclusion; I always swore I’d never share any of this, so take it while you can. Before I do though…