how do i prevent making same mistakes?

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Per Mark Douglas in his "Trading in the zone" book, this is purely a psychological issue.

Basically the problem is that sticking to your rules goes totally against the idea of trading.

Let's think about this for a second:

Trading is the only thing in life where you have total control over your decisions and total freedom to do whatever you please.Human mind is generally against rules, which shape our daily behavior, from driving the speed limit, paying bills on time, and doing whatever else we're doing, since 99% of what we do has rules.

So it is quite logical to want to get away from rules in trading as it is the only totally free form of expression, where the only true rule is the margin call.

So now you're supposed to have freedom - and yet you have to ask yourself to put rules around that very freedom that defines trading???

The only way to find success as a trader is to follow your rules - most people only react to fear - or necessity.

If you don't stick to your rules you will fail.The question is not "if" but rather "when" and how much money you'll blow through before you eventually jump out at the next stop.


I have the same issues and still working through them - I don't mind taking losses and will happily hit the bid if my exit criteria are met - I don't get out of a looser early - because the trade is still working itself out - I should have the same mindset about exiting my trades when they're profitable but they haven't hit my target....

That's my 2c.
 
Quote from oraclewizard77:

I still have a problem with taking my winners off before they hit my target price. I did it 2 times today, and both times they would have hit the target price.

I am getting angry with myself.

Anyone else with this problem?

Any advice to stop doing it?

It is not necessarily a "problem." 2 instances means nothing, statistically. For every time you do this, perhaps you took them off and the instrument gave back all the profit before it hit your target.

Over time, you would probably find out it means little.

Profit wise, it is much MORE of a problem, if you are taking smal profits and/or your targets are small. Because a few big winners might cost much of the profit. Generally, targets are only worthwhile if they are large.
 
Quote from jack hershey:

The combination of your two posts explains, on a trade, how things go for you. You have backtested and discovered that your targets are on the mark. What thei means is that you have a mental or geometric picture of trading cycles and you trade both ways on that market cycle from one extreme to the other. Imagine to two half cycles as forming a V or inverted V. They are probably tipped a little one way or another.

After both of these have happened, you probably feel pretty good having taken two consecutive trades with the same good result.

To get it to work again the market has to form three legs of an M or W or maybe do all four legs of the M or W. Doing the third or fourth leg seems "iffy" to you from what you say. It actually may be as your backtesting would tell you from an analysis of how many alternating similar legs are likely.

Redneck will tell you about his emotional experiences with this technical opportunity. My comments will just tell you why you feel the way you do because of the technical behavior of the market. You are on very firm ground with respect to those lousy feelings.

The 10,000 hours people put in @ 2,000 hours a year give the result bentedge experienced, too.

After the 10,000 hours, probably people see entry/exit trading some what differently. Cycles in trading follow a different course than most people start out thinking they do. Some people choose to think the same and others are open to new things (every day, perhaps).

Look at your entry and then look at the target. Now look at what is inbetween. Mentally, you deal with the inbetween in two different ways. At first you can reach targets and then after a while you do not reach the traget but the market does.

Fear and anxiety "build up" for you as time passes. What if you let the market tell you what was going on as a policy?

Look at how redneck does this. He uses four different charts. Each one says something else except for the fourth chart. The fourth chart says what one of the other charts is saying because it is a chart of composed of a composite of many things.

Keep using your present chart. But do put up another chart where the bars are 1/3 the duration of the regular chart.

On this chart what you will see that you can't see now is what happens as you go into your maximum fear and beginning of anger period. You see that you are on your way to the target, and then the price bars for a little while do not continue to the target, they take a little pause or small retrace. This steams you up. But as it turns out, in just a little while the bars start translating again just as they did after you entered. They finally stop translating when they get to the target you figured out.

I am suggesting that you look inside of each trade you do by using a magnifying glass by having another chart with a given magnification. this magnification will show you two things: how price moves with a given internal volatility an, second, how in the middle third of the time from entry to reaching a target, the price just takes a breather. At this time you peak out @ frustration, fear and anxiety. By sitting through this one third of the trade (the middle third) and seeing what is going on, you get to become confident and supported by what you are seeing.

Oh, if you have volume helping you, you get to see the first and last thirds are on increasing volume and the middle third is on decreasing volume on the magnified chart.

On your regular charts, the times when it is making you the most anxious is when the third trade of the am or after the first couple of trades in the pm breakout is testing R or S. Usually, the beginning of a day doesn't test R or S, then it does get around to testing the daily range; its retested in the pm.

Parts of trades (first and third parts are usually translations (see definition of trending); the middle part is often referred to as an "internal. There are five kinds of internals (FTP, FBP. hitch, stitch and sym*) By simply seeing one, you know it ends soon and translation resumes. The PA threads here do not deal with internals as yet, but they may some time in the future as people get their 10,000 hours in.

* by the way there was some chit chat on Covel the author of trendfollowing. None of these terms are in the index and neither is the word volume. Each of these is defined in ET. "clean page two" defines them.

Why is it that no trend follower of note remotely speaks of such gibberish? Just a question.
 
Done for this $12K - just finished at $21,788 in 7.5 trading days.....finally found something to take advantage of my natural inclinations that works.

Quote from jason586:

I have a similar problem and had a 90%+ win ratio with negative earnings due to taking winners way too soon and letting losers run to infinity while adding in.
I trade ES, YM, and NQ. This may sound strange, but I finally found something that worked for me. Although I had a hard time getting out of losers, I didn't mind putting on new postions which ever direction just as long as I didn't feel stuck or helpless in a postion I was holding; so I put that to my advantage by starting with 1/2 one direction and 1/2 another direction or very slightly skewed if I had a bias (i.e. 4 ES long, 4 YM short). It started my mindset from guessing a direction at the start of the day, and I would "take profits" which ever way the market went. The market nearly always retraced enough to rebalance some - then I work around a new pivot point. I am now actually trading versus speculating, and I usually make about 40-60 total contracts a day. I know it costs more in commissions, but my account has greatly increased since I switched to doing this. Only a couple days in a month has the market not retraced enough, and I had a losing day which was twice the size of my winning days. The key was then to start over the next day and not hold overnight trying to making it back. I did that once and got killed. The thing that took it to the next level was that I try to wait for an inconsistency and buy which ever of the 3 is the lowest and sell whichever of the 3 (ES,YM,NQ) is the highest at about the same time giving myself a bit of a hedge as they usually rebalance with each other.
I've only been trading this on small amounts ($12-$20K) before I move some profits - at least for now. This consisently makes me $600-$800/day on that amount with losing days at $1000-$1400. MY last 6 trading days have been extra strong and I took $12,000 to $19,600 (as of this posting time).
Hope this makes sense and helps.
 
Quote from GCSICLRBC:

I recommend scaling out (never scaling in).

Quote from R. Raskolnikov:

For index futures trading I have found the exact opposite of this to be true.

If you're in trouble => double ! :D
 
Quote from Trend Following:

Why is it that no trend follower of note remotely speaks of such gibberish? Just a question.

Most trend followers of note do not do anything remotely; they are in the limelght a lot of the time. So I agree with you, they do not do anything remotely.

They do not talk in a way that sounds like speech but conveys no actual meaning. Most all trend followers of note follow the conventional trend following methodologies and they form a network that espouses a rather complete and substantial body of work.

It is possible that some alternative trading methods do not overlap much with trend following. Some do.

Some possible and broadbased concepts might serve as examples. I chose ones you do not include and ones that I feel are cornerstones.

Channels

Volume

Hypothesis sets

Parametric measures.

Indicators

Deduction

Outside bar.

You have in your index an entry: innovation and decision making. On pages 184 and 185 you discuss and back up with authorities (Christiansen and McCarver) the topic of the innovator's dilemma.

You espouse "reacting" to data. This is profound and conventional wisdom.

Others here backup your position with regard to me with terms like convolute, obscure, unbelievable and astonishing. I have found these people to be thoughtful and the kind that stand up for their belief systems. They acquired such as a consequence of putting in time and doing what they decided was the correct thing to do.

They, as you are, are where they are as a consequence of a lot of effort. They exhibit, Steenbarger's test characteristics for being trendfollowers, the kind of trendfollowers you identify with: "High consciousness, low neuroticism and low openness" (see last paragraph of page 358).

I use Meyers-Briggs and Dosha testing instead. I have an X in an aspect of M-B and I am a triple Dosha.

So after 53 years, I have gone the deductive route and produced a one pager for trading stocks. Here is a story about that. I asked Chris at WB to use Blox to test it on a Universe. They couldn't get a universe, but neither could tradenavigator at first (different reasons for each). A substitute was agreed upon.

The first pass, the program done by Blox didn't work. They redid the drag and drop for the rules on the one pager and got the same result. By that time the sales manager of WB was leaning into the screens as well.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is defined as insanity, conventionally speaking.

The story is the classic sales and marketing third party "authority" story. If you want to sell something, then get an authority to talk to the person to whom you want to make a sale. I wanted a third party verification from a third party for a one pager. WB verified that they had never seen such an annual return and it was totally out of the box for ALL of the Blox programming they had done in the history of WB. The sales manager stuffed my hands with CD's and told me to pass them out to anyone who wanted them. WB wanted people to use Blox to refine their trading approaches.
Tradenavigator told us we were wrong about their data and so we had to take a few laps until they agreed with us.

I can point out to you that my glossary of 750 words has about no overlap with your glossary. It does not matter to either of us.

Obviously the 12 trends I pointed out on yesterday's chart are not your or other trendfollowers of note's cup of tea. On three levels of skills there were either 12, 36, or over 40 trades yesterday. They will show up easily on a WB Blox drag and drop if it is done a few times to get to understanding you always get the same answer and the answer is WAY out of the box for Blox people. It does not look anything like charts E.1 and E.2 of your Appendix E where over four years capital is doubled. That set of charts was obtained from practioners whom you hold up as a standard.

People I know who are of note would say that performance was terrific. What do those people say about us? They do compare themselves to us. The basis is live trading using different approaches. They use different brands of autos or different production years to make the comparison stand out.

So, in a thread now closed, you were given a gift. The forums associated with that gift, here in ET, got a few hits a year over five plus years. You have completed an evaluation of it and my supportive comments to the OP of this thread. Personnally I wish the OP were showing up here every am before open and then racking up points during our am session. The indicator I enjoy most is watching my buying power in contracts grow during each hour of the day.

I am just commenting on your question. It is good for you to recognize that what I do and transfer to others is different and it does not overlap what you do. I spent 6 times the number of years getting to where I am than you did getting to where you are. I did not follow your path for a new York minute even. I got to page 7 of the 4th ed of Magee and started graphing P and V on a brownline of a master for blueprinting in 1957. I traded at a rate of doubling (not compounded) in any quarter of a year as a beginner.

No one in your book was investigated by the SEC. I was investigated fairly soon when I got to using limited POA's and the SEC got computerized. They accused me over and over of "insider" trading. The SEC is not an organization that is very ammeanble to suggestions. They probably never will be as shown by their contemporay behavior.

WB Blox operators at Expo exhibits had to do Blox over too. The SEC had to rethink their accusations. Why? It was simple, they had never seen what they were looking at before. This is not a problem for you. your basis of determining communication commentary is what it is and will not change. You are in the communication business and you have your ways of operating that are etched into your mind as if acid did the etching. That is, there is now something missing in your mind since it was previously destroyed. Steenbarger can explain it to you.

This post will have little value for you. But at least you get to be introduced to six new vocabulary words. And as usual I will have stolen yet another thread from an OP who isn't focused on your current AGM's.
 
Quote from oraclewizard77:

I still have a problem with taking my winners off before they hit my target price. I did it 2 times today, and both times they would have hit the target price.

I am getting angry with myself.

Anyone else with this problem?

Any advice to stop doing it?

sure, stop doing it.....

simple enough
 
Quote from limitdown:

sure, stop doing it.....

simple enough

haha I feel like i have an iron will when I read these threads. My advice would be stop yourself before you exit and ask yourself if this is your predetermined exit price? If not, go make yourself a sandwich. You are in control of your every action.
 
Quote from jack hershey:

I use Meyers-Briggs and Dosha testing instead. I have an X in an aspect of M-B and I am a triple Dosha....

Neat...

I am said to be INTJ and Pitta Dosha predominant.
 
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