How can we improve our trading skill ?
- Thread starter Peter brandley
- Start date
actually after some thinking I am reconsidering that opinion,some drugs are ok once in a while,trading is stressful
My philosophy is to depend as little as possible on skill, hence I try to automate all my strategies. No matter how you do it, what's gonna kill you are your emotions. If you can get rid of them, half the job is done. Nassim Taleb put this very elegantly by drawing analogies to the philosophy of "stoicism" in his latest book "Antifragile".
> I'm going to have to disagree.
> My prop firm is a perfect example of how discretionary trading can win over "emotions".
> And there is not a system "algorithmic" strategy of trading that doesn't require tweaking, watching, more tweaking, adapting, more watching, etc.
> If you take trading seriously, you make it your career, then you make sure emotions do not come into it. If you're in it trying to make money and your love of money rules over love of competition & playing the game, then of course you will gamble more and probably get creamed.
Does a world heavyweight boxer or UFC-competitor let "anger" affect him in the ring from round 1?
People trade for less than 3-years (and who knows how much effort they actually put in) and they expect to be monsters after that?
Wrong, if you get rid of emotions then there is no reason to trade or to do anything at all.
Also, emotions in the form of trading intuitions (for people with sufficient pattern-recognition and market experience) can create far superior edges in some cases to an automated system.
If you can iron out or control the unprofitable emotions, and keep the profitable ones, you should be able to do better with discretion plus a system, than with an automated system alone, given the same level of market knowledge, trading ability, effort etc.
As a simple example, imagine a trader overriding his system to buy puts and exit longs on 9/11 after the first tower collapsed. Or someone who can smell the fear after a market crash, and buys as the last bulls capitulate.
Quote from Sergio77:
You learn trading by trading.
An expensive sport. Tuition is high.
You learn by studying your trading and working on how to improve it. Plenty of people have 30 years of market experience and still don't make money.
one possibility is perhaps to follow his approach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_and_enumerative_statistical_studies
I like your comment about having a mentor to save frustration because I felt this emotion in my early days and even thought to leave the forex trading but I am still attached with it and trying to improve.