ES Journal Archive (2009 - 2010)
- Thread starter Jahajee
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I will say this from my personal experience, even though I am no veteran in a world of trading, nevertheless I have seen the good, bad & the ugly times in trading. I will try to keep this as brief as possible. As we deal with probabilities everybody's probability will be different. As you can see from my posted results I am not anywhere near 80-90% win rate. Sometimes I have great days when most entries are in the black, sometimes I get days when it's a 50/50 scenario, but sometimes I get days when I can get 5 consecutive losses. Do I pack my bags & leave? No, I don't. I walk away, go over charts with fresh eyes & get back to place another trade. How do I control emotions? Simple. After wiping my account I have realised that it is not about any 1 single trade, but about an overall result of many trades. Realising that I had a problem in money management I went back to the board trying to find a money management strategy that would suit me, not somebody else. So I went with Volente's posts regarding scaling out, as inferior one might consider it to be, to me it was a superior strategy as I realised that I can turn trades that could have been losses into winning ones by scaling out to lock in unrealised gains in 2/3 of my position & leaving 1/3 to either go for a larger gain, if I happen to be on the right side of something big, or get stopped out near entry (that depends on market conditions at the time). I realised that there is no way I can make this work by overcommitting capital to any 1 single trade, so I have reduced size that way that I can easily have a red day & not be emotionally disturbed by that occurrence. Therefore, I have cut size to suit me & my trading style & money management strategy. I have learnt to not put all the eggs in one basket, but to spread them eggs via many many trades over the course of a year in smaller size & let my personal positive expectation/probability/research of many years do their work. My advice to you would be to not trade until the time you have gathered enough capital to sustain the ugly times, as we can all have them. I still consider myself a piker, as you can see from my trading results, I believe it's good to have an open mind & to always remain a learner with market being our primary teacher. I still have mistakes, they are evident when I go over a trading session where I had to fight Mr Market. Mr Market is not our enemy, we are, we can be our own enemy.
Best to all!
P.S. People like to bash gurus & so they should I suppose, as some of them lie about actual results, etc. But, there are mentors out there that earn their fees honestly. Some ask, why do they do it if they make money from trading? Surely, they ought to make enough money from trading. That may be so, but there is the crack - trading carries an amount of uncertainty of outcome, whereas teaching carries zero risk or uncertainty of outcome & therefore can be a 100% profitable business. Moral of this story is if you decide to trade full-time I wouldn't rush to quit your job or start advertising your business for sale. I am a photographer & still snap away, even though it is less nowadays. But I started charging more
I am going to add here, what is your risk/ reward, where should you have your stop? This is a serious question if you are going to play futures even with small size. At $12.50 a tick you can still lose money pretty fast. You can't really dictate to the market your risk/reward. The old maxim is ride winners, cut losers. This simple statement is harder than it looks because there is no guarantee your position will be correct when you put it on. For example the other day when the market spiked had I had a hard stop, I would have been taken out of a good entry. Some of the other newer traders seem to be looking to gain 2-3 points with a similar stop. You should be aware of the different types of stop placement such as trailling, volatility, etc. Good trading.
http://thepatternsite.com/stops.html
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