james16 Chart Thread

as Jim always says, what is stopping most people is what is in between their ears.

It is the truth. You have those that get to high when they are winning, to down when they are losing. The best traders I know are the ones who emotions are in check. They understand this is a variance game we are playing. When you can find yourself being overly emotional about a scenario try to identify that moment like you did find out why and then try to some how put it behind you and continue to do what is working for you. I find the more you face something then the next time it doesn't pop its head out as much, and the next even less. I don't know anyone who doesn't have some sort of emotions. Even those with fully mechanical systems must deal with the good and bads.

Mike

and take my gold with it

Geeze! I need multiple monitors.

K.I.S.S.

My point exactly,, you try to fight the quick sand.. you're only getting deeper
thats why am glad I'm still on dry land ..

I agree, very good point. I honestly just need to stay the course.... some of the best traders have consistently said that their spouse can't tell if they have had a winning or losing day. To me, that is the state I am trying to gravitate too. I am almost the opposite though........after a big week I tend to be more reserved and after a losing week seem positive I will make it back. I feel I have an edge and over time it should continue to work out that way (though ten months is still pretty short in the big picture of things), but I feel at this point my focus needs to be more on this part of trading (90%) vs. entries/exits (10%).

Mike, how did you get so smart?

Here's a question that I've been grappling with the last couple of days. A breakout and a pull-back is easy to play as the pull-back will give you a pin, IB or OB off the old trendline.

What I'm not so sure about is how and where do you get into the initial breakout of the trendline (ala the recent GBP/JPY or today's AUD/USD)? My problem is I worry about fakeouts so leave a buffer but by then it seems too late! I have no idea what sort of buffer to leave - if any.

Help!

Probably no perfect answer, but typically I only play them (like on the Gbp/Chf) when there are several bar highs together. I put an order above that and then see what happens. I am not smart enough to play them any other way. If I don't get clear bar highs (or lows in the case of a short) I wait for a retracement.

Time, practice and experience. And there are no shortcuts, as I have found painfully.

It's amazing what accrued chart time will do. Of course there are the exceptions, people who struggle in the wilderness for years too stubborn to see what they are doing wrong. But in finding this thread and James, we truly have found our way to something that is BS free. Now add to that a few years of chart time, and you are looking at being in the same place Mike is. Or Rac. Or Jim himself.

I am the happy owner of Forex Tester! A quick question though... should I generate my own data history using MT4 and the broker I'm currently in, or is the free data history FT4 provides good? I'm comparing the chart of a particular pair and the bars aren't the same...

Here's the chart time and back testing!

Anyone taking a touch trade on EUR/CHF, or looking for PA to go long?

Hi Frank, I'm using their free data. Personally, I'm not concerned with it matching my broker. Price action is price action. It's the quickest way to get up and running in my opinion.

Hope this helps.

-- Danny

Simple.
by barking at the right tree & having a great trainer.



NOTE: i often respond to dobe_r_man in such a way that my posts/replies relates to canines.

You really help break up my boring days at work...........ha ha.

I've experienced all this and more. You describe it so well I can almost taste it. The feeling when you are actually successful and you think "why do I feel scared or tentative?" I think it's partly to do with what Nelson Mandela once said about "it is not our darkness that scares us but our light" or as Michaelangelo put it "the greater danger is not that our goals are set too high and we will not reach them, but that they are set too low and we will". Or to be much simpler about it, fear of success.

We've all dreamed, played with our compound interest calculators, gazed at pictures of the material things we want. And trading more than anything else I know can provide us with that. When we have mastered it and are consistently profitable then trading can also get very easy. Takes a while to get there, I'm not there yet, but I've studied enough traders to know it's true. So I think it's perfectly feasible that a little success can be scary.

Some people say that to be a trader you have to be ice cold, win or lose. I don't think this is the case. You'll always have emotions. Look for the video of Paul Tudor Jones the day he lost 6%. He doesn't say much but the camera catches him as the news comes in, and it's so revealing. He is utterly torn up. But I think being a good trader involves managing the emotions as they appear and trading in spite of them.

It's a simple mental shift but a powerful one. So when you lose and you feel bad, you don't think "darn I shouldn't be feeling bad. a good trader is unemotional" but rather "okay here is emotion. I know that when this happens I don't revenge trade and I also don't get tentative. I just continue with my plan and also take the steps I know I need to to alleviate this emotional state" In my case this would be meditation, taking a walk, sharing what happened with a friend etc.

That way you don't make yourself wrong for going through the ups and downs but you treat it like getting the flu. Rest up and take meds. You don't blame yourself for getting sick because you don't have the expectation that you will never get sick. But you do have a responsibility to manage it well. It isn't your fault to get the flu, but go swimming in a cold lake with the flu and you are almost certainly to blame for what happens next.

The only other point I want to make regarding emotion is that in the early days of trading everything seems magnified because the individual trade is such an important part of your overall trading. If you've taken twenty trades, one good or bad trade is 5% of your total trades taken. If you've taken 10,000 then it's only 0.01% of your trades taken. Which is another way of saying that with time and experience comes a wise old "I've seen it all" attitude.

And the great thing is, time and experience come to all of us who stick at this and utilize a common sense approach. We're all getting there if you just stick around long enough.

i believe u deserve one more monitor.. or two.. or three..
your enduro pictures will look good on them (as wallpaper)

Man this is so true and put more succinctly than I did.

If we don't learn from our mistakes we are doomed to repeat them. First we identify whether there was a mistake and if so what it was (easier said than done, there's a tendency in the early days to view every loser as a mistake. It's an important part of the curve to accept that losers will happen IMO). And then after that to have the self awareness to know what we were doing wrong, and then the courage to make the changes necessary to prevent it happening again.

It comes down to, as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Closed out the G/J 4 hour short (cyan arrow) with a 2R profit. Trailed it out using minor ppz zones. Just happy I stuck to my plan.

-- Danny

Hi John, this is excellent seminar. Many thanks!

Perhaps do you have something more by mr Pring?

Short and to the point.

Guys. Message #50,000.
Respect!!!

This is a great quote Aaron, I think this comes from the fact that (as newbie's) we make mistakes... lots of them. This causes emotional pain from losing trades due to our mistakes.

And then we learn some... but we still lose. How do we distinguish this new type of loss from the other mistake-riden losses? This is where I think it's very tough for newbies (like myself) -- distinguishing a loss due to a mistake from a loss due to variance as Mike has mentioned.

Getting over this hurdle is my current goal in my development. Losing hurts. It sucks. But it's okay, because I have a plan and I get satisfaction from executing that plan. Now I will go to my hole and repeat that to myself 100 times.

Thanks Aaron and Mike... great stuff!

-- Danny