james16 Chart Thread

eeek! Tia got into the blue pills!!!!

(gotta slow it down...)

Know why you cannot take those with Iron Pills???

Excellent point, Josh!

RM

Someone might mistake you for a compass?

K.I.S.S.

raczekfx, wouldn't you consider 1.58 area a more powerfull PPZ?
Thanks!

LOL !!!!!

Yep! You'll point North!

Haha! Not that I'd know.

K.I.S.S.

lol.

what happened to mike?

we just get going and he cuts out.

get out of the bathroom mike.

yeah thats all those brits do.

guess its all the rain or something.

i gotta stop. my stomach hurts.

Lolol

I am headed to the gym to get the blood flowing in a more productive way. I will let you and sp dig the hole deeper

have fun mike.

hope im not banned by the time you get back.

if i am its sto's fault.

I wanted to crystallise a few thoughts floating round in my head by writing about them and hopefully it'll help others too.

We all want to cut our losses and let our winners run. That's the key to trading right? But people say it like it's as easy as throwing a switch. It's not. It's a bit like when I work as an actor and I get told by a director to "be in the moment". Yeah. Great. Now tell me how.

Because there are arguments on both sides here. Look at that recent GBPCHF pinbar long that reversed at the highs. And the weekly AU and GU. These bars all ended up retracing over 90% and then, in GC's case, shot to the moon. The AU and GU gave you good opportunities to get out for break even or with a small loss and they may yet play out profitably. So cutting your losses on these would have resulted in losers, right? And aren't we supposed to give trades a chance to play out? Isn't our stop loss the price we pay for seeing a trade, and killing the trade early becomes a sign of emotional trading?

Well yes and no.

The same case can be made for winners. We all want to be in the big mover. In fact show a chart to anyone who doesn't trade and they'll say "wow if you just held from here to here you'd be rich". I bite my teeth rather than asking them how they would handle the 50% retrace. It all looks so easy with hindsight. But we also don't want to constantly take small pieces of the big moves and then watch as the full bar losses wipe out our profits.

I believe the key is to have a way of trading where all the parts offset each other and make you both profitable and comfortable. I've written about this theme before. Jim doesn't mind about RR because he cuts trades rarely taking a full bar loss. Mike allows trades to breathe and so doesn't move his stops up so quick.

My point is that if you took Jim's "quick profit don't worry about RR" style and added it to Mike's way of letting his trades breathe, then you would probably not be profitable. Nor would it work the other way round. You can't look to get into a 1000 pip runner if you kept moving your stops to break even after 20 pips.

Adding all the components and finding a style that works for you across months of trading, keeping you profitable and comfortable, is absolutely key. I try to think forward. You've been trading a year or more profitably. It's comfortable, easy, even boring. When you see that vision are you happy with the amount of chart time you're spending? Or are you thinking, "man I see that other guy make the same percentage returns from an hour's work a month". It's so exciting at the beginning that we spend hundreds of hours in research and chart watching. But it's good to develop a style that will be sustainable over the next few years. Clockwork71 is great when he writes about this and his Silent Service thread is superb.

I know I am working for quality of life. I want to have a home in the US and a home here. I want to be able to travel and look at my laptop a few times every day and have a simple structured hassle free way of making good profit. So I look for strategies that I don't have to baby. I don't want alerts waking me up in the middle of the night for the next ten years. So I adjust my trade selection accordingly.

This stuff works. And if you work it, it will work for you. So how do you want your life to look in the future when you have that big account. Do you still want to be watching five minute charts and peeing into a bottle? Or do you want to be spending time at the lake? Yes, Ryan is a fabulous example. He went from living in his car to having 2% of his account be the price of a car. And a nice one too (no matter what bobster says... ). He could go on and make $100 million. But I am guessing he has everything he wants and he wants to sit back and enjoy it now. So he goes to the dailies.

I may be putting words into their mouths, but I think that for Jim and Mike, having nailed how to trade, they get their greatest joy from teaching others and watching them grow. This thread and the private group is more than a full time job for Jim and believe me he doesn't do it for the money. So my point is, think of the future and where you want to be. How you want to be living. And bear that in mind when you're putting together your trading style. None of us want to burn out.

The thought that started this, before it went off into a tangent, was one small mental click that helped me with the idea of staying in bigger runs. We always think "oh my God it's run so far, I need to close out". But think of it this way. When you move up your stop loss to lock in profit, you ARE banking the profit. And you're getting to keep a speculative position open for free. No messy searching for ways to re enter. You've closed out and banked the part you have locked in. And you have a risk free look see entry on any future action. When I thought of it like this it seemed a no brainer.

It's those little ways of looking at things that unlock it all for me. And move me closer to my goal of effortless, low risk, high reward, low maintenance trading. It's fun right now and I spend all my time looking at this thread, backtesting and chart watching. But soon, when it gets old, I still want to be able to make the same amount of money from a minimum of effort.

And join Ryan on his big private lake....

Rant over....

Somebody grab that liquor bottle away from the big guy. Sounds like somebody's having a good day.

geez.

i swear some great stuff comes out of that dressing room.

its SP.

he does that to me.

i started it and he knows how to stoke the fire.

"stroke the fire" . . there you go again.

(funny stuff)

You sound like my brothers when we were growing up. My parents were visiting this week and told my son that they wish they could have skipped kids and gone straight to grandchildren.

I proceeded to burn the meat that night.

This is what happens when Jim finds the marching powder...

That guy has four sets of alimony to pay. If he isn't a member of PF he sure as hell needs to be.

"I'm sorry. We've run right out of Waldorf"

Nope, that was my face when the GBPCHF took off without me.

Don't get me started on you Texans big guy.

I haven't laughed this much in weeks

PS Three pages appear while I type one long post. If there's anyone popping blue pills here it's the James16 Chart Thread