A Trader's Philosophy: Finding Success in Losing Trades

Rational expectations is a hypothesis in economics which states that agents' predictions of the future value of economically relevant variables are not systematically wrong in that all errors are random

That is, it assumes that people do not make systematic errors when predicting the future, and deviations from perfect foresight are only random.
(pulled from wikipedia )

basically, no matter what you will never accomplish the perfect trade with absolute zero drawdown. Yes we can time the market correctly sometimes and feel that we have made a perfect trade, but in reality you can not have the perfect trade in a random market. That's why every time we trade it might feel like we have made a mistake, or made mistakes in our executions even in our winners. The real mistakes that we can learn from are the ones where our future price predictions were wrong... not the execution side, but the fundamental reason for why you think the future price will end up in that direction, also the mistakes that we make while managing the stop loss and t/p... I think we have to separate the mistakes into 2 categorys- was it a mistake in the trade direction or t/p s/l, which we can learn from and correct? or was it what appeared to be a mistake on our part but reality it was just a result from market randomness.. something that we can not correct...

maybe he would understand better if you said, finding FUTURE success in losing trades. By studying your losing trades you will realize your mistake and not do it again in the FUTURE which will equal success.

Oh come on now, lets face it, lets be honest with ourselves. How many times have you put on a trade and the second after you push the button you say out loud, "OH SHIT" because you just realized something that you didn't take into account in making the trade decision that you just made. Face it, you blew it because you just made a mistake. You can make several of these trades in a day or in a week and each time the mistake might will be an entirely new mistake. So, I don't see how anyone can say that you can't learn from analyzing your mistakes. A lot goes into a successful forex trade.

Many factors have to be taken into consideration in making a trade decision. You may get nine (or whatever number) of those factors correct but it will be the tenth one that you forgot about or just plain failed to see that will turn your trade into a loss. Sound familiar anyone?

I agree that practice makes perfect.

Correct me if I am wrong but has anyone mentioned journaling of trades in this thread yet? How many times have we all heard how important this is? Doesn't this activity lend itself to the analyzing of trades that is supposed to make us all better traders?

Hedging