Trade or Give up?

Hi guys, anyone here has been trading forex profitably?

Anyone thought of giving up before trading profitably?

How do you cope with the feeling of giving up?

Yes brother. I have more on my accounts than I've deposited in total. That means I made money. More than any bank would've given me, yeah. How? Don't ask. Anything goes, really. Just keep the positions small and take your profits while you have the chance.

How do you cope, good question. Think back how you've coped with other difficulties? Life isn't always fun and games. If it hurts, give it some time, occupy yourself with something else, then come back and try again. Yeah that's the keyword, if you happen to have a life, you'll get over that spanking the market ineviatbly gives us at times.

And one more thing, stop listening to losers :-)

Just don't put all your eggs in one basket. Trading is a hard and egoistic thing. It's hard to justify that your work brings good to anyone. I guess my biggest enemy is me. I had margin cuts, I blew up even demo accounts when I started. I'm still good at loosing money. I'd say, it's very easy to loose.

What you really need, is set some goals, find some interesting things to learn. If trading and learning doesn't bring you any fun at all, just quit. You should like pressing submitting your orders and your heart must race a bit when you see your huge TP is about to be reached.

Thanks for your advice spekitox and Uilen.

Hmm.....at times when I look at my trading "report card" and see the "red" and few "green" (red outweighs green), I wonder if it is possible to reverse the same strategy and turn red to green and green to red? :-)

This is actually what I want and am moving away from.

I want to get to the stage where the whole thing is nothing but a mechanical process. I don't mean that in the way that I will have defined entries, exits and stops that are set in concrete and not budge from that, but I want to get to the stage where winning or losing will not raise a flicker of emotion in me. It'll be hard to get there but if you don't aim for it, you'll never get there.

I want for trading to be the least exciting, least exhilarating and most mundane part of my day. I will simply build my profits and take the troughs that will absolutely 100% occur as nothing but minor inconveniences along the way.

I do think some people should quit though. This isn't for everyone and I cannot begin to explain to anyone without some involvement in trading how much of my time I have dedicated to this and how much knowledge I have absorbed. They just wouldn't be able to make any sense of it at all. It has been my life near enough now for 3 years and it's really only now that I am easing off on the learning and spending more time on honing my skills. I have no real idea whether there are people out there that this all came swiftly and naturally to but it didn't for me. I worked my nuts off to get where I have got and glad I did. For the large part, I tend to feel that if you aren't prepared to work VERY hard to achieve success in trading, you'll not do it. It won't happen by chance. Only a small number of retail traders become very wealthy from trading and I have made it my life's goal that I will be one of them. Even then, there are people with all the same desire but no ability to tame the beast inside them. No calmness, level headedness or ability to rationalise what is going on with the charts. For some people, pure desire cannot be enough and their character flaws will always prevail. Only you can look at yourself and answer the question "have I REALLY got what it takes?"

Trotty, sure, you are right. But I am a different kind of person. If some work or activity doesn't intrigue me or touch me in any way, I get bored and I quit.

I could not continue working in a bank because of the routine and "mechanic decisions" or whatever you called them. At some point I just could no make myself go to work, which is not fun. Which I could do, and did it properly, I had a nice career development. But I quit. It just wasn't fun.

Forex is fun. It's fun to win, sometimes even more fun to loose. It's a pleasure when you draw right conclusions about some macro-news. It's an excitement when you backtest some new strategy and it gives you 40% a month

I am not telling that one should not have any RM or MM, or system, or logs, or trading discipline. It is absolutely essential to keep the things going. But without this fun-factor, I wouldn't be able to find any incentive to carry on and make these things going. Just making money isn't interesting enough.

Trotty, fine post.

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Like any other activity in life, the longer you trade, the more confidence you get that you know what you're doing, and hence the more mechanical your decision making becomes. I've heard it called "unconscious competence". I don't necessarily mean to the point that I can predict exactly how price will behave in each individual scenario, but more that I have a more accurate feel for a likely range of outcomes, and consequently what are likely best and worst case scenarios. Then as long as I can somehow make the best case(s) outweighs the worst, the setup is valid.

For example, if there's a climax volume candle on M15, and one that follows a decent move away from congestion, I've grown accustomed to seeing 4 possible outcomes: (1) outright reversal of the move, with the climax candle's high/low being the extreme; (2) outright reversal, but with price zigzagging for a while, and probably forming an extreme just beyond the candle's high/low; (3) a pullback/lull in the intraday move, after which the candle high/low will be broken, as the move continues; (4) the climax actually reflects an influx of pressure into the move, resulting in increasing strength.

My point is this: having resolved the nature of these outcomes, can I build a profitable entry/exit system around them? One that keeps any ensuing losses small (low risk entry; fast move of SL to breakeven; etc), and maximizes gains, when there is either an outright reversal (outcomes 1 and 2), or an influx of strength (stop and reverse on outcome 4)? How soon, after the climax candle forms, can I detect which outcome will prevail? How far is price likely to travel, on average, with each winning outcome - far enough to cover other losing outcomes, and the spread? If I can answer yes to these questions, then I have a fairly simple, profitable mechanical system.

Then there are other factors that can slew my decision making: does the climax candle form a double top/bottom, or reach into a previous supply/demand zone? Where did price close in the candle (e.g. did it form a pinbar)? If I was to place a trade, am I trading in the direction of the longer term (D1/W1) trend? Where in the context of this trend are we (pullback; resuming following a pullback; reaching possible exhaustion; etc)? And finally, what news events are imminent?

FWIW, this is one of the entry setups that I use.

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@dvc11: if you're not completely ready to give up, here are some threads that you might like to read. The first two are about finding low risk entries:
Deadly accuracy
Touch trader

These are about allowing intraday entries run with the longer term trends, thereby creating high RR trades:
Building an equity millipede
Trading major lines

I've found some excellent ideas from these threads. James16 is also good, if you're happier trading the longer timeframes.

David

Many months I traded with few different concepts are mostly profitable. Sometimes strings of bad luck hit me and I become annoyed or frustrated but I never wanna give up because I love this game and I want to succeed in it, I don't want another game (where I start as noob again, and learning curve aka a bunch of failures again)

I always think there must be a way and I will find a way. > 50% of my (trading) business concept is mind works, meaning I work with my mind to achieve a positive mind state that allows my business to move forward positively, like optimism, hope, visions, etc.

Wanting to give up and frustration is on the opposite direction. So when I felt those, I will do anything I can to bring myself to another direction.

Positive trading progress starts in the mind

an excellent book by Seth Godin, The Dip, puts this in perspective.

Winners quit fast, quit often and quit without guilt, until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.

Recognizing if you are in a Dip or in a Dead-end is the key to success. If it is a dead-end then it is time to quit because no matter what you do it won't get better. if it is a Dip then you need to work through it.

Too many people stop when they hit a Dip while too many other people keep going when they are in a Dead-end.

Great book. only 80 pages and only about $10 on Amazon or free via torrent.

Give up. It's a sucker's bet. Frankly, going to Vegas is better than Forex, at least there you get some shows and drinks before you lose all your money.