DislikedYou've obviously got a natural mindset for this game. Totally agree about planning - trading is entirely won or lost before you place a trade but my journey wasn't as smooth as yours I started just before you back in 2007 with the conviciton that nothing, absolutely nothing, is random. Applied to the markets I managed to lose hard, way beyond chance, so I kind of proved the theory in a way I wasn't really hoping for for about 2 years solid. Set about discovering a decent strategy and initially went down the esoteric route but came up wanting so...Ignored
with focus to automation you mean fully automatic running trading programs (like EA in Metatrader) of half automatic (so you run and stop it at special times)?
both can work very good, needs only different ways of programming. i do run trading programs too that run like a very straight line when you zoom a little bit out the equity curve, but i do much more volume manual because i feel more save with very high turnover per month.
to be honest i startet to learn trading many years before 2008, but i call this my training years. i did with stocks from 1998 and later did come to forex because of different reasons. i did also attend on automatic trading championship in 2007, but it was a total disappointment (i am very good when i know the rules and try to be best inside this rules and find possible strategies, because i like problem solving of any kind very much, but they changed the rules inside the contest to stop by purpose my program to work, after i had extrem wins in first weeks with near no drawdowns and was unbeatable, because the EA was exactly written for the rules of this contest to win ... ). and i did see that many thousand people start follow what i did and overrun brokers and contests the following years "copy paste" style. that's why i never post trades again or make it public. at maximum i speak about the performance or statements or what currency traded , volume, but not entry points and exists and so on - so no strategy burned by this. i learned a lot from this experiences, for trading and life.
after this i had to reinvent all new (started from beginning) to be total out of enough other traders style used to get enough scale able trading volume for profits increasing (of course any strategy has a maximum possible volume to trade when its very short term because of many reasons). so its never worth to show short term trading systems public, or you destroy it over time and need again do some work to reinvent new, because trading burned strategies is useless and brings to high costs again other possibilities.
so at the moment i trade some strategies that work since 2008, some i reinvent new yearly and add (when i find time for this, but most of time simple comes automatic as a byproduct of the time by my normal trading, because you simple recognize it and then simple follow the fixed steps to find out all about and how to make a advantage/disadvantage list added point including with all other you have already or even create something total new), and some other strategies are automatic changing by market behavior, so core strategy is same all time but some changes (most of time by a box of fixed rules) necessary to stay in touch with current market.
i wish you all best for your journey.