When I started daytrading (around 1992 I think) I was trading Forex, and switched to S&P when it was still at $500 a point, so before ES appeared. My broker called me several times a day to ask my opinion. After a few weeks already I noticed that what I told (which was what my system told) what I should do. But my brain sabotaged me and I did not follow the system. Every evening after the close my broker called me and asked me: why did you not do what you had to do. You would have made a lot of money.
He also said then that he did the trades that I should have done. So I knew what to do, but refused to do it, and he made money with my system. I became so angry and it was so painful for me that I decided to clean out my brain and, just like a zombie, to follow the system. That was the best decision that I ever made in my life.
I banned human psyche. I don't need self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. I came to the conclusion that I could never beat a mathematical system. All I had to do was to have the discipline to just do what the system tells and surely not to intervene, just execute without even thinking as the system also defined where the stops should be.
It's good you were able to overcome it, but you can see, from your own experience how strange it is that you know what to do but find it difficult to execute. You don't think that is self-sabotage? But i do and have several anecdotal stories i could tell that proved it to me in my own experience. And the remedy could be what i call self-promotion, whereby one pulls out every disciplinary trick in the book to overcome some pretty obvious sabotage.
I'm looking at the problem from a macro viewpoint, wherein the mere appearance as an air breathing earthling is a manifestation of, and evidence of, self-sabotage. So we've put ourselves in this difficult position, and have to develop tricks to survive, let alone thrive. I call that self-promotion. The problem is the self-sabotage is ongoing, even as the self-promotion fights it. This battle is happening way underneath the brain, beyond common observance. Ideally, something happened on that level that guided you to not listen to anybody and come up with a mathematical thing that nobody else does, or has thought of, to ease your situation. If not, then the brain-brought solution might just shift the sabotage to some other area of your life. So maybe now there is no problem with finances, but then health problems creep in.
The universal sense of guilt, which fuels the blame game, needs to be short circuited through self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. I don't mean the earthling self. I mean the Self which abdicated its own existence, and denied its normal experience, in exchange for something so small, limited, changeable, poor, ignorant, divided, and vulnerable. In this case, the solution isn't necessarily cash, but rather, escape from the situation through full Self-acceptance.
Good for you. Almost all people that I know got in starting from 2017 or later.
If you really believed in it and invested a decent amount, you should have become millionaire by now.
So my approach has been two-pronged, attempting to affect the macro picture, as well remedy the most immediate problem pressing down, the problem of petty cash flow stealing one's entire time, and distracting one's attention from the most important factors we must deal with. That and other distractions.
Maybe I've had some effect, or maybe I've come up with a brain-brought solution, but i now have a method because I too stopped listening to so much noise and followed a hunch that popped into my attention two or three years ago. It's vague because i have been distracted, and have wasted a lot of time, continuing with some residual self-sabotage, since coming up with, refining, and proving the method.
My approach, like yours, doesn't check cycles, and just tells me what to do. And especially, no f^%4ing "support" and "resistance" zones!
But will i do it?
There came a time in the 2014 bear when i said to my self i would endeavor to obtain twelve bitcoin, feeling as though that would solve retirement issues sooner than later. Twice the opportunity landed in my hands, once when BTC was at $200, and again when BTC was at $14k. Yes, i had $167k worth of crypto on January 15, 2018, representing a 33x improvement on my investments. Right before self-sabotage took the upper hand, again. I had yet to pave a clear trading path to take profits, to sit out, or go short...yet. Seeing this as the problem, i really resolved to get out of cycle prediction, and get into a neither bullish nor bearish opinion, and concentrate on merely following some indication of shorter-term directional moves.
The seminal idea is simply this: What is an indicator? Why do people use indicators to filter other trades? I thought, well, unless the indicator itself makes at least some reliable probability of profit, how could it possibly be useful to guide other trades? What we need is an equity curve that always goes higher, but with less volatility than new technology like BTC. We have to start with an equity curve with reasonable drawdowns that we can actually work with, even if the overall yearly gain might not be all that high. THAT is the job of an INDICATOR. After that, our job is to trade our own f*&$ing equity curve!
So again, what is an indicator? An indicator is something that monitors the noise in the market AT ALL TIMES, and by indicating when to reverse, converts the unmanageable swings of the base market to something more manageable called your own f%$#ing equity curve. I mean, have you ever heard of anybody using a moving average just on Mondays and Wednesdays, or just on longs but not on shorts? No, so the task at hand is to find something,
anything!, that is constantly either long or short (always "in"), which can ameliorate the volatility in the markets by reducing drawdowns while maintaining a generally upwardly mobile equity curve. To find that anything, i just stopped listening to people and followed my own hunch. I gravitated toward price action and started research on engulfing candles and worked my way out from there. The thesis is that if it's not possible to stay in the market, either long or short, and make even a little bit of profit over time, then technically, it's not possible at all. Otherwise, stop losses and targets make no sense. In an always in method, the reversal point is its own target, and its own stop loss. The thesis further theorizes that if you then only take "trades" in the same direction of the "indicator" (which is always in, building its own equity curve), one should be able to yield a significantly higher profit factor. A lot of the time I "wasted" was proving to myself that this is true. Then, if your drawdowns are still too much for comfort, then handle as many uncorrelated instruments as one can, in the shortest time frame one can justify, for the portfolio effect.
So, where is this reversal point? It's kind of confidential right now because it seems like an original idea that i have spent years of pain and labor paying for. But i think anyone, forced at gunpoint, could find
something. To me, it is worth more than a mere twelve BTC. Find it and you will find peace knowing you don't have to listen to so much noise about trading anymore.
