What makes you sabotage your discipline?

Really good read and contribution. Thanks!

Expanding further,

The discipline issue isn't a problem for mechanical strategies which can be 100% coded. The problem arises when there is the slightest discretion in trade decision making. To alleviate the problem for this kind of strategy:

1. You have to have the strategy well thought and written down, the goal is to be able to extract the systematic components of the strategy
2. Write an EA that takes care of the systematic parts of the strategy at any possible level: entry, trade management

So what you end up with is hybrid strategy that combines the best of both worlds. If your trade decision process relies on charts reading and interpretation you use your intuition and experience to to identify any potential setup. After you identified a setup you "describe" its entry and management parameters to the EA and you're done. The EA takes over and takes care of everything: calculate lot size, trade parts, place pending/market orders, raise @BE after reaching a pre defined level, close1st part @TP1 etc.

What I described above is exactly the way I am trading and since I implemented this method my profitability and consistency hit through the roof. On top of it I sleep much better at night knowing that my trading "best friend" never sleeps and takes care of all my open positions.

Hope it's useful.

same here except I have excel

So you are just checking in on your "friend" constantly and that's it? (well, with corrections now & then if you see it necessary)

You are more like a mentor to your EA?

Not checking it constantly. Now and then. Thing is, it allows me to move away from computer and do something else. And many times this is good for profitability, imo.

I think in Forex every one wants to maintain there discipline and he can not because everyone wants to make more money in the greed of making more and more money he losses his discipline and loose.

Greed and fear!

The best is to have a fixed stop loss on every single entry before the trade is taken and never ever adjust the stop loss.

That's exactly how I started to trade recently. But I adjust take profit sometimes, is it good? Or should I follow the same rule for TP as well?

Gotta a friend who is totally lost it. The guys doesn't place stops on his trades and I had to literally force him to close the loosing orders. What would make someone abandon their system( a profitable one) and succumb to indiscipline? Hard to explain.

I know, for example, that my strategy have its drawback and sometimes i was not able to sustain multiple losses without reaction. For example like these days, price is ranging hard and makes little move. Big temptations to 'swing'...

Most of the time the discipline pays much (for my strategy) more than 'gambling' on some trades to recover. And now i stricly follow my trading plan as i am always in profit for more than one year. Maybe not a lot but always in profit (so i protect my capital). I believe to make big profits, i must be lucky, yes ! The market will or will not give me big profits, impossible to know.

If you admit that your strategy will fail sometimes, then when you have an incredible string of winners, protect this 'lucky' capital. It won't last for long.

Like 'gambling', the best money management i found is to start with 'big' money and reduce the money as long as you make profits. I called it 'the target profit money management' : When you win : reduce (with a floor), when you lose : keep same previous amount. Always size in amount, not in pips.

With a reasonable target, like 50% per year, it works for me.

Example : First trade = 2% of initial capital. Winner = reduce next amount. Loser : don't change amount.

trading should always be this way.

Your capital = Willing to risk + what you want to protect each time.

Psycho yourself that you are currently on a profit of $500 on the capital of 10k.

Once the equity dropped to 9.5k you might want to halt for awhile to prevent getting emotional and getting into random trades just trying to revenge and get back at the losers.

Losses is the only thing that can be controlled.

Risk + cost for each trade, target is flexible, but should worth at least 1:1 .

Trading management comes in with time factor + volatility and price action. Meaning you might want to break even the trade to be risk free by bringing a trade into a new sessions or into a news coming soon.

Break even free trade is better than be caught in red when trend go against us. We have to limit our risk and loss meaning, initial stop loss planned at 20 pips. But because price moved ahead for 15 pips, and based on that fat candle that pushed price in ur favor, u might want to move stop loss to below that fat candle to reduce your costs, instead of 20 pips, it can be like BE + 1 or 5 pips risk due to that fat candle which was in ur favor.

Then moved on to new trade ideas and control ur thought that u cannot make every trade a winner.

A - Accumulation - Base of capital and earnings from new trade
A - Allocation - Allocate your investment into each planned trade
R - Re-Distribution - distribute or reduce the risk and cost so you have more bullets for other trades, or add onto winner by trailing ur initial winning trade forward and higher and place further stops order in flow of trend
R - regeneration - > if followed a discipline flow and proper trade management, we would have alot of small losers, but when the winner comes you will bagged alot. And flow back to accumulation and the cycle goes on.

Adjust profit is fine, such that a high was created, and price break trend line, u might consider to to on a lower hi near that high or same high. So you won't miss the exit since trend-line showed price momentum exhausted.

But u can take profit and place further buy stop above that former hi to catch further flow and trend.

Always be prepared to lose what u can lose, for instant, you might also want to trail ur equity growth.

Meaning made 10%, u might capped stop out at 8% before month end, then to be caught in a roller coaster etc etc.

Keep trailing so we have R T S instead of S T R , we also want our equity to be on a up-trend, if we cannot generate higher equity, we want to consolidate near the top of our growth by having smaller loser and wait for a big winner to overlapped that former resistance.