"keep it simple" - yeah, RIGHT
- Thread starter Gordon Gekko
- Start date
Here's another generality: One man's "practicalities" are another man's losses
Trading successfully is such an individualized art that knowing another persons specific technique is of little value. You must make your technique "your own", thru practice, observation, brutal self-assessment, and adjusting.
I read some other threads with people lamenting that they have read so many books about trading, but can't make money. That would be like reading dozens of books on boxing, and then expecting to be good at it without a lot of sweat, bruises, and experience. Continuing the analogy, your technique is like a boxer's gloves....it should be fairly simple in construction, while both protecting you and giving you a means to attack. But you will only learn to be good at using them by letting go of your fears, and taking some lumps, while learning from your mistakes. Develop your own style, based on your strengths. If you try to imitate someone else, you will fail. When you get to the point that you realize you are really just battling yourself, you have "arrived"
A trader I admire said the secret to trading is as follows.
A. Find a system that works
B. Prove it works
C. Trade it
I reckon thats pretty good advice.
The second greatest piece of advice I ever recieved was.
"The way to make money in the stockmarket it to not lose it."
Too many tradere focus on making money, when they should be concentrating on capital preservation.
Jesse Livermore himself said "There are times when even the best trader on earth can't make money in the market"
These times always remain our greatest challenge
The third best piece of advice I ever got was to think of the market as a Cow. A big fat cow. You milk a little from the Cow everyday. Over a year it adds up to a lot of milk.
Runningbear
A. Find a system that works
B. Prove it works
C. Trade it
I reckon thats pretty good advice.
The second greatest piece of advice I ever recieved was.
"The way to make money in the stockmarket it to not lose it."
Too many tradere focus on making money, when they should be concentrating on capital preservation.
Jesse Livermore himself said "There are times when even the best trader on earth can't make money in the market"
These times always remain our greatest challenge
The third best piece of advice I ever got was to think of the market as a Cow. A big fat cow. You milk a little from the Cow everyday. Over a year it adds up to a lot of milk.
Runningbear
Look for several trading systems at www.dacharts.com and interesting stuff about indicators in the newsletter of www.ensignsoftware.com
You must have 3 things.
1. You can get the money you need to trade easily enough.
2. You can get the knowledge/psychology from reading books AND looking within yourself. (Van Tharp material).
3. You can get the experience you need from trading, looking into methods and systems etc....(buy some shares, sell some...based on a thought out trading idea. and see if it works over the long haul.)
...and i would go in that order. get the money you need to trade, then get the knoweldge and work on yourself as best you can.
...and then trade..
after you incur your initial tuition losses...go back and repeat steps 2 and 3 as often as necessary.
If you can't understand this, I don't see how you'll ever make it as a trader. You MUST have money, knowledge, and experience to be profitable PERIOD. All of them are important.
so go figure it out and enjoy it for what it is...a giant puzzle that must be solved before you can enjoy monetary reward.
1. You can get the money you need to trade easily enough.
2. You can get the knowledge/psychology from reading books AND looking within yourself. (Van Tharp material).
3. You can get the experience you need from trading, looking into methods and systems etc....(buy some shares, sell some...based on a thought out trading idea. and see if it works over the long haul.)
...and i would go in that order. get the money you need to trade, then get the knoweldge and work on yourself as best you can.
...and then trade..
after you incur your initial tuition losses...go back and repeat steps 2 and 3 as often as necessary.
If you can't understand this, I don't see how you'll ever make it as a trader. You MUST have money, knowledge, and experience to be profitable PERIOD. All of them are important.
so go figure it out and enjoy it for what it is...a giant puzzle that must be solved before you can enjoy monetary reward.
Per your earlier comment:
"I know this may sound like painfully stupid advice, but the thing that turned me around as a trader was simply looking at charts. Not charts with stupid indicators all over them, just bar charts.
I'd look at support and resistance points. How they broke, how they retraced, how they followed through. How failed trends reversed. Where I would enter, where I would exit. No trading just observing.
I didn't look for patterns they talk about in books, like wedges and triangles. I looked for patterns that my own mind recognised as being similar to other repeatable patterns.
My eye found two. They have no name. I've never read about them in a book. As far as I know, no other man on earth uses them to trade, but I see them constantly in many time frames. I trade them they work most of the time.
Forget everything you have learned and start to observe. Really observe with your own mind's eye, what's being revealed. Your mind will find it's patterns. It's own way of modeling the market. Not someone elses."
Were you able to quantify these patterns by backtesting them in something like Tradestation or did you just trust your intuition?
"I know this may sound like painfully stupid advice, but the thing that turned me around as a trader was simply looking at charts. Not charts with stupid indicators all over them, just bar charts.
I'd look at support and resistance points. How they broke, how they retraced, how they followed through. How failed trends reversed. Where I would enter, where I would exit. No trading just observing.
I didn't look for patterns they talk about in books, like wedges and triangles. I looked for patterns that my own mind recognised as being similar to other repeatable patterns.
My eye found two. They have no name. I've never read about them in a book. As far as I know, no other man on earth uses them to trade, but I see them constantly in many time frames. I trade them they work most of the time.
Forget everything you have learned and start to observe. Really observe with your own mind's eye, what's being revealed. Your mind will find it's patterns. It's own way of modeling the market. Not someone elses."
Were you able to quantify these patterns by backtesting them in something like Tradestation or did you just trust your intuition?
<b>What do you like to do, Gordon Gekko???</b> I really liked your list of all the dimensions and alternatives in trading -- there sure are a bunch of techniques and many are mutually contradictory.
But so much of this comes down to finding something that suits your personal style. For example, I ask you, how would you like to spend your days?
* playing a flight simulator game?
* researching economic trends?
* playing poker?
* running statistical analyses?
* reading balance sheets?
* playing roulette?
* deriving equations?
* sketching lines on charts?
* writing software?
Which of these activities sounds like fun and which would you hate to do? This is more than a rhetorical question. I am curious.
But so much of this comes down to finding something that suits your personal style. For example, I ask you, how would you like to spend your days?
* playing a flight simulator game?
* researching economic trends?
* playing poker?
* running statistical analyses?
* reading balance sheets?
* playing roulette?
* deriving equations?
* sketching lines on charts?
* writing software?
Which of these activities sounds like fun and which would you hate to do? This is more than a rhetorical question. I am curious.