A noob's learning curve
- Thread starter ADONAI1ST
- Start date
Nevermind, when you said smooth, it made me think. I was looking at a 5min chart.
*smacks* Why on earth would you follow a lumpy chart with noise?
I was just looking on my phone app. I hadn't changed it, it was set at that by default. I don't use it really, I have been useing trade view 15 min chart when I've been trading.
Dude... you're starting to sound like a fake to be honest. You're asking almost rhetorical questions. Most people who throw money into this do a bit of research so they know something about volume and using stops. You're just going about this so randomly that I cannot even believe any of this is serious anymore. One day you accidentally enter an order for multiple contracts and get lucky. Now you get stopped out once, and then decide to not even use a stop? Come on... get real. If you were a real person, trying to learn trading, you wouldn't be this stupid. When I read again your first post, you say how you just figured out how to go long? Jesus. Today I learned how to take a crap in the toilet without missing the bowl.
Calm down Chief! No fake here. This is paper, no real monies. I think you're reading to much into this thread. It's a journal, so I can come back and read it. Any help is greatly appreciated. As for my erratic style, I'm just trying to get familiar with trading, I'm not tying to make money at this point. The more trades I make wether win or lose, I get closer to developing a stadegy IMO. I take it you don't agree. So be it.
It did end up turning around. +$780 and hit my profit target. This will be a good trade to study for me I think. I was never down more than a few hundred and a small account could have handeled waiting on the turn around. Still would like to have not had so much of a pull back.
When I set out *thinking* about trading, or really just to "learn the markets", so many years ago an analogy about taking a crap and expecting not to miss any toilets, without knowing where the toilets are, is good enough for what was going on at the time. I knew I could code anything, so just making some automation for setting buy/sell-triggers should be enough, right? Didn't have the balls to try it out live though, so set me on a path of analysis-paralysis for the next 5 years. Although I had the code ready for automating execution, I just couldn't trust it to trade correctly because I had no clue what that really involved.
It's depending wether you have traders/knowledge in your family, friends/others, or going at it all alone, despite all opposition from the former and except all the crap on the interwebs where you need to filter out like 99.99% of it in the end. Of course, for those in the industry the learning curve is probably quite different and shorter - more make it or break it, less of a hobby on the side of a real job.
I suspect some people are naturally adept at trading too. Seems some people are endowed with buying and selling at profit no matter what it is. Not something everyone is endowed with though, just as not everyone is an athlete, stand-up comedian, etc. So repeat after me: We're all individuals!
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In fast-moving markets (especially at the times of major news announcements, which are good times to avoid having an open trade for this reason), the broker may not be able to close your position where you wanted.
There are some brokers who will give you "guaranteed stops" (which means that when that happens, they close your position with them at the specified level whether they were actually able to close a trade in the underlying market at that level or not, thereby effectively transferring that risk from you to themselves). This is like buying insurance: you're paying extra (and it's expensive) to guard against the small possibility that something sudden and adverse might happen, and to mitigate its consequences (or make them irrelevant) if it does. Very few traders find this worth paying for, and providing it is a very profitable additional income-stream to the few brokers who offer it.
The underlying principle is that you should position your initial stop-loss at a level which, if reached, would be an indication that your reason for entering the trade wasn't actually a valid one on that occasion (as it turned out) and therefore you no longer wish to be in the trade.
You can also move the level of your stop-loss while the trade's open. People often do this to "lock in some profit" when the trade has moved in "their direction" but they don't want to close it yet.
It's almost always a mistake to move a stop-loss in the other direction (i.e. make it wider, because the price moves against you) and I wouldn't recommend that.
Talk about a cluster F.