Originally posted by nitro
Dark,
I agreed with everything you said in your previous post, but IMHO, this is not good advice [ at least it seems to have been for me.]
You may well be right nitro- I hesitate to give trade specific or method specific advice to people since methodologies and personalities are such individual things. In recommending a mechanical beginning, I may have strayed from that discipline. But the reasoning for it was not to promote one style of trading over another, but more in the interests of initial discipline and intuition development.
Remember the Karate Kid? If the market is Mr. Miyagi, then starting mechanical is kind of like 'wax on/wax off, paint the fence' imho.
Walking the path of excellence is like walking a balance beam; lean too far to the right or the left and you fall off- maintain equilibrium and you move forward. Some people are too overeager to jump in before they can swim and trade wildly from the start; others are overly cautious and rigorous to a fault, hesitantly moving forward an inch at a time and fighting their fears every step of the way.
So, good advice for Jim might be terrible advice for Joe and vice versa. It was my impression that Aphie had such a surge of emotion that it was like getting clopped over the head with a sledge hammer made of silly putty, and that he was responding to it by reaching out hither and thither (the salad bar analogy).
The advantage of starting with a mechanical approach as I see it, even if only for a short length of time, is that it gets you through the adjustment phase- like training wheels on a bike. Emotions might always be an issue for some traders, but no matter what they will always be
more of an issue in the very beginning and tone down a bit later as newness is replaced w/ experience. Thus following a rigid system for a little while- getting a few dozen trades under your belt, executing under a set of systematic rules- gives a chance for that initial fear / euphoria blast to wash itself out while protecting the newbie from anything too crazy or dumb (as long as he is following the system).
It also seems to me that we learn by riffing off other ideas and putting our own twist on them. Great novelists grow up reading other great novels; great musicians have heavy musical influences from other great musicians etc. A common question from the beginning trader is "where the @#$% do I start?" I say, why reinvent the wheel? Find something that appears to work in real time, something robust enough and straightforward enough that it's very hard to screw up, then just
observe it in action for a while.
Observing a simple system in action, and thinking about it constantly as you observe, is like planting a thought garden- ideas will spring up over time, and those ideas will help move you in the right direction as defined by
your skillset and mindset rather than anyone else's. Some might get even more mechanical, others much less so. Some might move to even shorter time frames, others to longer time frames etc. But you have to actually trade and observe in real time- books and simulations don't count- because You are a key element of the process.
Maybe it's like a science experiment. There are three chemical compounds: the market, the method, and YOU. What happens when all three are mixed together? This has to be found out through real time experimenting, but you want to do so in such a way that the lab (your trading account) doesn't blow up.
p.s. I personally am in the discretionary camp by most anyone's definition, but what I do feels mechanical in a lot of ways because there is so much structure to it. Dichanical? Mechscretionary?
