Made a lot of progress, but feel like there's so much more to go...

[trader99]

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Position size it; so if you lost it all, or your life, family would be OK. Good point,T99, on much of the future being unknowable.....; but some of the future is knowable-trade/invest too big you will blow up an account.

My trading account(risk capital) is a small % of my total assets. I would never put myself in a position where I would lose all of my trading capital. But it's a good point to be cognizant.

Risk is something you don't mess around with. Intelligent risk-taking is what trading is really about...

 

[murray t turtle]

My trading account(risk capital) is a small % of my total assets. I would never put myself in a position where I would lose all of my trading capital. But it's a good point to be cognizant.

Risk is something you don't mess around with. Intelligent risk-taking is what trading is really about...

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Agree; i'm not exspecting WW1 to repeat, but the market shut down for years, then. But then it gapped up, so for cash buyers, well, the stock market [cash]is a 200+ year uptrend. Expecting a bear move by SEPT, but it's[SPY,QQQ....] fairly strong for the weak JULY-SEPT quarter. NOT a prediction.

 

[futrstrdr]

I have finally settled on watching just 4 markets, CL, ES, GC, and NQ. But I focus mainly on CL. I use tick charts for all of them. But it has taken 21 yrs to get to this point

 

[trader99]

Here are some observations. I have been doing a combo of scalping, intraday swing trades, overnight, and now multi-day holds(only on very specific type of setup and not a regular occasion).

For the right type of setup, the multi-day hold is the most relaxing and most profitable trade.
For the right type of day, intraday swing can be nicely profitable and not much stress.
Scalping is about focused and frequency. You gotta be quick in and out. It's the lowest risk. I think you need SIZE to make a good money. 1 lot scalping is a sort of waste of time. 1 lot intraday swing can still be nicely profitable.

 

[JSOP]

How did the consistently profitable traders who make a decent living deal with the uncertainties?

Never risk more than you can afford to lose. Uncertainty is part of trading and you don't think too much of it. Just deal with the uncertainty the best you can when it becomes certainty. That's it.

 

[Arthur_er]

Never risk more than you can afford to lose. Uncertainty is part of trading and you don't think too much of it. Just deal with the uncertainty the best you can when it becomes certainty. That's it.

I agree with you, you can never be 100% sure about your decisions in trading so never take too much risk which can't afford.

 

[murray t turtle]

If you had one piece of advice for aspiring traders what would it be?



In my case I slowly built my capital to where I have several years of living expenses put aside.

Most all these post are good; rule of 72 helps. Work 12 hours a day 6 days a week; sorry,cant really pin to down to one thing.

 

[trader99]

Here's the dilemma. It's actually kind of tragic. So, after all this time, I finally made good progress in my trading. I feel like I have a steady edge, etc.

But to get to this stage, I loss a lot of $$. Though I'm steadily making it back, if I looked at the total loss(up to now) I would be totally discouraged. But if I look at current gains then it's encouraging. I know losses are "sunk cost" in economics theory.

While my latest series of trades have been superb, I'm still net down. There's also opportunity cost. Time I spent trading is time taken away from other productive stable income generating activities.

How would you deal with this dilemma...

 

[vincentnyc]

Here's the dilemma. It's actually kind of tragic. So, after all this time, I finally made good progress in my trading. I feel like I have a steady edge, etc.

But to get to this stage, I loss a lot of $$. Though I'm steadily making it back, if I looked at the total loss(up to now) I would be totally discouraged. But if I look at current gains then it's encouraging. I know losses are "sunk cost" in economics theory.

While my latest series of trades have been superb, I'm still net down. There's also opportunity cost. Time I spent trading is time taken away from other productive stable income generating activities.

How would you deal with this dilemma...

you have to treat trading like a business. it is not a job where you are guarantee an income. when you start a business, some month you lose money, some month you make money. it is also why 90% fail when starting a business just like trading. if you can't deal with this. just put your money in an index fund and don't look at it until you are 60 years old.

 

[trader99]

you have to treat trading like a business. it is not a job where you are guarantee an income. when you start a business, some month you lose money, some month you make money. it is also why 90% fail when starting a business just like trading. if you can't deal with this. just put your money in an index fund and don't look at it until you are 60 years old.

I totally agreed with what you are saying. I think that's not the main point of my question. My question deals more with "sunk cost" vs "opportunity cost".

I just came back from cardio exercise. And I kinda resolves this dilemma by reframing it as this.

The loss is done and over with. Spilled milk. Sunk cost. There's nothing I can do about the past. I can do something about the future...

Now, I seem to have somewhat of a viable edge(cautiously optimistic). What I can do is apply my edge a few hours a day. Keep risk under tight controls. And the rest of the time focus on my non-trading business. And those few hours a day will compound. I estimate at the current flat rate of earnings it will take me probably 1 - 1.5 yrs to recover all of my prior losses.

Then another thought occurred to me. This is assuming linear growth. What I've noticed is that experience compounds. I would imagine I continue to get better. So those few hours a day compound so that the average winners get bigger and bigger. I hope...

Then there's outlier winners. I've noticed once a week or once a month there is ALWAYS a killer move somewhere in one of the markets I trade. Ride that with size and it will be multiples of my normal winnings. That's what happened in my last run of trades. Small wins. Small wins. Then the last 2 wins were 34x - 100x my average winner respectively. Now, ironically these big winners were almost stressful free in a sense that they were right from the get-go. They are not normal occurrences but they occur often enough in a month. This is when everything lines up perfectly and I load with size and I feel in my gut it's right. Obviously they could go wrong. Then I would get out right away. Tight leash.

Let's say conservatively, I catch one of those big moves once a month. Perhaps I can recover faster than 1.5 years. And it could snowball..

That's the optimistic case.

But to hedge that, I will need to continue to focus on non-trading income stream.