Minimize risk, maximize profit and ride a trend

Hi AdamO,

I wanted to drop a message in your thread to say thank you.
The past months I continued my quest to become a trader with newly found energy and ideas from your thread.

In my demo account I managed to make some profit, so in a couple of weeks I'm going to give it a try with a live account.

So thanks a lot!! :-)

How are you doing in the meantime?

Hi Krisch,

I am really happy for you.

Feel free to share your journey here so others can also benefit from it.

How do you trade? Is it similar to my trading?

Thank you, AdamO!

Well, I finally established what a high potential is in the set-ups I'm looking for.
So to get rid of my "itch" to jump on everything everywhere I developed a dashboard that gives me an overview across all pairs & timeframes where that signal occurs.
Based on my availability and mental state I can decide which ones I want to verify.
--> This is really important for me because at first I tried it with push messages at every signal.
But I learned that it's best to only look at charts when your mind is up for it, so that works for me.

When I open a chart based on the signal I got from my dashboard, I rely on my gut feeling that I developed during the hundreds of hours of chart time.
If I decide the signal is valid for me I open 2 trades with the same size.
One at 1 R:R & one without TP set.
There's a high likelihood the first one gets there, which means the second one is totally free.
--> This is another "mechanism" I created for my mental state. I do not longer need to open charts when I actually don't want to, or have the time for it.
Rather quickly the trade becomes free to run wherever it wants to go, or gets stopped in a loss.

Closing the runners is something I'm still experimenting with. But I guess that part is about the same as you're doing it, closing some trades when you feel like it to lock in some profit. And I'm happy with that .

I don't know if I have interesting things to share for others.
So I'll not pollute your thread as that's definitely not my intention.
If there would be questions from others, I'll be happy to answer them of course.

Feel free to share it here. I believe everything important to very nice living from trading has been already said.

I'll share with you also a detail I did not mention.

For couple of months now, my entries are purely mechanical. Just crossing the MA. Nothing else. It works great for me as I do not overtrade this way and still I get few signals a day so I dont feel like doing anything

I really believe the entering is not important at all. Just moving it to BE and waiting couple of days or weeks to see what happens. After couple of weeks you'll find yourself with plenty of unrealized profit. And that is basically it. Too simple to make it complicated...

Today I re-read most part of pipEasy's posts. Quite a reading.

I must admit I always find there something new that I haven't noticed.

I've bee fighting overtrading basically all my trading career.
I've been working for the last few months to get rid of this problem. That solution has been to make my entries into trades as mechanical as possible.

Now I often enter trades even when I don't feel like it just because I'm being purely mechanical, like a robot.

There are a lot of trades where I don't enter at the optimal price and I would have opened it better myself. On the other hand, I ignore a lot of trades because I didn't get the signal.

To be honest, it makes me a little sad that a person works for years to perfect his trade entries and ends up having the same results with a completely primitive approach.

Again, it just confirms that the entries to the trades are not the most important thing at all. It's certainly good to spend some time on it, but don't spend years of your life on it.

So I hope that those who can handle the emotional burden of this approach will stop worrying about how to enter trades, and focus more on how to be mentally ok during the trade.

Another thing I noticed is that Graeme often closed trades with a profit of about 200 pips. I always thought he held positions indefinitely, but that's not entirely true. He was regularly adding equity money to his balance.

But the important thing was that he did hold some positions extremely long in the direction of the monthly trend, and when he felt the trend was reversing, he would liquidate the positions at a profit.

I only noticed this "detail" now.

His rule was to hold the positions for at least a week.

One often focuses on unimportant details and loses an important principle that would have saved a couple of years.
Finally, after all these years, I have come to what Graeme wrote at the beginning. Only I didn't see it then...

It's unbelievable how many gems there are in Graeme's posts.

I re-read his thread many times as well and I find myself each time with new insights & energy afterwards.

I'm incredibly grateful that he shared his wisdom.