Here's my free tset-up, and it is a psychological one:
Stop looking for the Holy Grail. If you have just started, turn back, before it is too late.
Stop tweaking those moving averages, Bollinger bands standard deviations, CCI periods. It does not make a difference.
Stop jumping from trading system to trading system, never satisfied with less than perfection, always wanting to get the drawdown to zero.
Stop trying to capture every single trend, only to get frustrated with yourself when you, being human, miss one.
Stop spending your evenings surfing here, trying to find the one method that will make all of your dreams come true.
Every system, every trader, and every set-up does not work, sometimes. Sometimes even bad methods succeed, for a while.
Successful traders have losing streaks--the law of averages guarantees it. Probability theory helps one get a grip on reality here.
Traders and dieters have about the same level of long-term success: small. Very small. Did you know that?
There is a new book out there on the psychology of dieters. Do you know what the 90-some percent of dieters who fail tend to have in common?
They keep switching from diet to diet, and never really stop.
The dieters who succeed go on a diet ONCE, and then stick to a practical, liveable eating style from then on.
Oh sure, they sometimes put on a few pounds, but they do not go on what people tend to think of as a diet.
They make the necessary adjustments to get back on track, without emotion, and with confidence.
Those who diet, and diet, and diet, ensure their failure by dieting. Likewise, traders who keep searching for what does not exist ensure their own failures by making trading more complicated than it is.
There are countless methods and systems that work. Not perfectly, of course, and sometimes work rather poorly. But over the long haul, they work.
When you find one that you can live with, commit yourself to it. Learn to love it, in good times and in bad, through sickness and in health.
