The Bucking Bronco

Hit and good night. ... but... CU

From my personal, private Journal.

Saturday morning.
I'm studying my charts and my trading of yesterday.
Analizing my actions on the battlefield and my psychology during the different phases of the battle.

The Premise: post #483...
The Object to observe: application of the Rules that I was able to build in years of study.
My comment: in the end, actually, I can see only one mistake in my diligence in following/applying my Rules.
And the lack for the perfect behaviour depends totally and completely by my temperament/personality.

@All,
Hope you enjoy the show, yesterday.
Difficult to understand?
I know... BUT... as Livermore teaches, a man must have some convinctions to do this profession.

Yes Jesse Livermore.
Every day, Jesse continues to offer to me timeless lessons.
After yesterday I'm specifally meditating of this line of HIS thoughts... that (at this stage, by now) are engraved in the deep on my mindset.

"Tape reading was an important part of the game; so was beginning at the right time; so was sticking to your position.
But my greatest discovery was that a man must study general conditions, to size them up so as to be able to anticipate probabilities.
I knew that some day I would find out what was wrong and I would stop being wrong.
I would then have not alone the will to be right but the knowledge to insure my being right. And that would mean power."

Unfortunately (Hey I'm not a futile primadonna here... I must write this to help my readers comprehension of the reality...)
- from the PM I received - I must deduce that many of you don't even know what I'm talking about.
And a large part don't get the importance of this whole my quoting.

Really, by the Internet and on a public forum, I cannot do more than this.
Again: the promise I made to fti is, to me, completely fullfilled.
Indeed, I think I did much more than what I was obliged to do.

Connect the dots. All the dots.
If you can't, if you are not able to do it, is not my fault... but it is fault of your level of preparation.

Sun Tzu... preparation in your own temple, outside the battlefield... etcetera.
And the cycle of my eternal rant starts again and again.

Yes.
I'm very worried about the average knowledge, comprehension and committment of the typical Retailer.

In my not so humble opinion... Trading is a profession and nothing less.

Most professions such as medical, legal, psychological, pharmaceutical, technical, mechanical, engineering, etc.,
require several years of education, study and effort.
Not to mention the money required for learning the necessary skills.
Then it takes many more years of actual practice to develop the skills and gain the experience to become successful.
It is ironic how many of these same professionals attempt to become successful traders without even the slightest knowledge of the markets
or more importantly, money management principles.

This occurs because there are no barriers to entry in this business.
If you want to enter this profession, you just need a few extra resources to open an account and that is it.
However, if you wanted to become a doctor or a lawyer or enter some other profession, you would have to pay for an education,
study hard, take tests, and obtain a license, etc., before you can even have the opportunity to find a job or start your own practice.
This same principle applies to going into business yourself.
Even if you wanted to simply open up a party store or a pizza shop, you would have many barriers to entry.
This is not true with the trading business, which is another reason so many people fail.

Have a good weekend of study.

fti's lesson... handle with extreme care. One mistake in getting the proper sense, and you are doomed. For sure.

from Alan Watts: Conversation with Myself.

... nature is wiggling. Everything wiggles.
The outlines of the hills. The shapes of the trees. The way the wind brushes the grass. The clouds. Tracts of streams.
It all wiggles.
And for some reason or other, we find wiggly things very difficult to keep track of.
And, you know, we say to people "Keep still so that I can see you."..."Keep still for the camera."
And we say, “let’s get things straightened out”, “let’s get it ironed out”, “let’s get it all squared away.”
And somehow we think we understand things when we have translated (them) into terms of straight lines and squares.
Maybe that’s why they call rather rigid people "squares"... But it doesn’t fit nature.

You know, wherever human beings have been around and done their thing, you find rectangles.
We live in boxes.
Our streets, especially across states like Kansas and Nebraska, are laid out in a grid pattern.
Why they even dropped a grid pattern on top of San Francisco, with all those hills, so that cars run away.
Because it seems that the human being really has a very simple kind of mind, and all this wigglyness is too complicated.

I don’t think it really is complicated, because, after all, it’s very simple to move,
say... to raise something, or to open and close your hand.
It’s perfectly easy, because we don’t have to think about it.
Things become complicated only when we think about them,
and that’s because we are trying to translate them
into a form of life very much simpler and cruder than the form of life that we are talking about.
A triangle is very much simpler and cruder than a mountain, even though you may represent a mountain with a triangle.

Human beings are just as wiggly as nature.
And our brains are an incredible mess of wiggles, and that’s the part of ourselves that we understand least at all.

DAX H1 Les Miserables. Contemplating the obvious. It is called Trend. Up Trend.

Indeed.

Shaking my head.
I continue to read things about Trading that I don't understand, thing that I don't even get the meaning of.
I give up.
They come here, read my posts, approving or commenting positively...
and then they go to do or write exactly the opposite of what I suggest, theorize and offer in Live Trading every day.

Common sense is not so common.

I've got a long list of real good reasons
For all the things I've done..

TAF. Reading that material is neither simple nor easy.
Read that thread with extreme attention. Think well on what you are reading. Try to get it right.

In the next lines (just some picked, selected excerpts) you'll find fti speaking, in person... listen to him.
If you don't get me, try to understand his words.

"What I do is a very thin road, just one missed step, and it can turn out to be the highway to hell, esp with the snowballing."

"Hey, (me) you haven't given them the whole thingy.
They are left to their own interpretations and style.
They probably do not understand.
You know they may not be so experienced.
So can you blame them? YOU, my friend is at fault!
And maybe doing them a dis-service by providing them the bullet to blow their brains out.."

@ all the TAF people

Next 13th of this month it will be 2 years of fti's absence.
I'll state it clear.
Suspend TAF thread and stop to write on it.
Freeze it on that anniversary. It's a good occasion.
Preserve it as clean and safe as possible for the next readers willing of some good knowledge.

That is my personal proposal.
Respect fti work.

Posted on TAF #58241.
Please support this initiative, giving your adhesion there.

Hi Jupiter, I noticed, reading many of your posts, that you use H1 trend and then entry on m5/m1. Now the 1 million dollar question is: what do you use to determine h1 trend?

1) Higher highs and higher lows or low highs and lower lows?

2) Moving averages?

The answer I expect is 1. But then the problem is that sometimes I can spot lower highs and lower lows in an uptrend and the opposite in a downtrend. How to avoid this? Thanks and have a nice weekend with your family!

First of all the unexpected answer is: BOTH of them. 1 and 2.

Second. There is nothing to avoid. It is the normal Price Action, that a Trader (if he is a trader...) must know how to recognize, handle and manage
following his own personal Rules and Style.

Third. I don't teach. Don't want to teach. Have nothing to teach.

Fourth. Don't try to outsmart me.
You had your answers on my PMs. Well, significantly more than 1...
To be even more explicit...
as a FF Yellow Flagged you lack and miss the basics of this Profession and have big problems of mindset.
My suggestion is to buy a good Technical Analysis Manual and start to humbly studying the fundaments and slowly build on them.

BIG FULL STOP, please.

Yep, great man. The dramatic, sad truth... in two song's titles.

(SUNDAY) MORNING COFFEE talking about Education, Preparation, Conscience.

Sean McLaughlin, a proprietary trader and a Chicago Board of Trade member who specialized in equities, commodity futures and options for close to two decades
...tells his cautionary tale.

After two decades of trading, McLaughlin has realized that his resume “makes a dry desert bed appear fertile,”
he has “little or no transferable skills that ‘check the right boxes’ for recruiters and machines that scan your online job application.”
He regrets spending too little time networking because he was solely focused on building his trading account.
Unable to make enough money trading independently or find an in-house role,
McLaughlin finds himself out of money and desperately needing to find some income to support his family.
Now that McLaughlin’s savings are gone, he feels “alone…. inadequate…. lost. Scared. Anxious. Depressed. In debt. Unhealthy. Unloved. Afraid of losing my family.”

He writes in a Blog...: “The crushing weight of a lifetime of poor financial and career decisions seems to be collapsing around me all at once.
I’ve prided myself on my stoic ability to quietly and privately shoulder my struggles
— shielding my friends and my family from the maniacal ups and downs of my trading career.
But the burdens are suddenly and swiftly becoming unmanageable.”

In seven months of job hunting, McLaughlin has landed only one face-to-face interview,
which he said went well, but they decided to hire someone else.
He's seeking help from a therapist
and says that, "if you’re an aspiring trader and you’re focused on managing risks and not blowing yourself up as you learn — that’s very good.
But it’s not enough.
You need to also consider the opportunity costs of spending your time trying to make it in this profession
against time better spent building a career elsewhere.
I wish I had given this some thought in 1997, not 2017.”

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be … traders. Yes, no, maybe... under which conditions?

Two new books that I'm reading during these last nights... yes NIGHTS.
as some of the readers noticed and immediately PM to me... LOL.

Hey, there is someone really "attentive&accurate" here around...

For example... do you know that the son of Mario Draghi is a trader?
And a big one, to be precise...
and he was trading Eurodollar in Morgan Stanley.

Yes, life sucks. Yes life is unfair.

Amen to that!

when to call it quits before it's too late.
when to keep on going forward.

I don't sell dreams. As someone accused me...
I'm proposing and indicating a path of sufference and pain. Serious education and solid formation.

I made things too complicated? As someone else accused me...
It's up to you to judge and decide.

Do you prefer 300 pips underwater, a margin call, 50% of exposition of your account, sell in each support and buy in all the resistance...
as some well informed and well educated TAF praetorians substain?
Do you really think that this is what fti taught and still teaches through those gems of wisdom?

It's time to suspend that thread.
Respect fti work... and learn to read those precious and valuable lessons in the proper way!

They have to stop to write those things on that thread!
Full Stop.
That is what I think.

Actually, that is 300 pips on a Demo account. I buy when PA confirmed and sell the same. I do have Live and Demo accounts for several and different purposes. And I don't advocate my style.
Regarding the Margin Call, you should then know the conditions of my Live trade account where I may trade 150%. The problem was in my human being mistake when I activated two orders 20 times bigger than intended and didn't manage to cut them at once. That was not hope but just my own battle. As I wrote on TAF, my single/ separated trading accounts never exceed 2% of my trading CAP. My leverage can't exceed 1:20 even if I wished so.
Your battles and style are yours, my battles are mine...

Once again, I advocate nothing, I am learning, specifically making different training scenarios as on Live so on Demo. If you probably noticed, I did delete the respective texts on TAF, so not to mislead anyone.

I am grateful for your critical remarks as well as much appreciate your inputs. And I like your trading style as mentioned already before.