Mental break-down from TA

The entry is among the least important pieces of a trade plan. Stopping trading real money was a good first step, but you've still got a ways to go.
 
Quote from cashmoney69:

I stopped trading for a while, and went back to paper trading. I've made more fake $ in the last 9 days than any one month trading real money. Maybe its luck, because its not an emotional issue. I feel the same way with pt's as I do real money.

You trade well on paper. You don't trade nearly as well on cash.

If you believe that "its not emotional" and "you feel the same way" then a more touchy feeling person than me would say "you're not in touch with your feelings." I'd say that your brain is very complex and you are not aware of whats taking place below current conscious awareness while you trade.

Buddha created a "religion" to expose your conditioning. Guy Claxton wrote a book "The Wayward Mind" based on the latest research. But, if you trade better on paper then with cash, trust me, something is happening in your mind.

It was in mine. It took a lot of work to understand that element of myself (better anyway). The beliefs posts are good - IMHO this is one of the main reasons why trading in the real probabilistic world is so hard.


PS. Great reference Lamont_C. Db is one of those guys who said he never had conflicts but he also claims its because he did so much pre-work that he was completely confident about what he was doing when he traded. Most of us, like Cashmoney, do damage to ourselves as part of our learning process or have conflicts from earlier in our lives.
 
Quote from Lamont_C:

Back up five posts.

from slowbear?...about repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome?.

The only mistakes that I know for a fact that I'm making are trading off fear and trading on impulse.

Fear based trading is not that big a deal I think as long as you employ good money management techniques, which I am. Impulse trading is my biggest problem. Patience has been a problem for me just about all my life, and thats where the trading on impulse comes from. I'd probably make a good scalper....then again probably not :mad: .
 
You've got indicatoritis and the disease, untreated, is debilitating...

Get rid of the intraday charts and the weeklies and just keep the dailies...

Drop all but one of the moving averages...

Now that's better, isn't it?



Quote from cashmoney69:

Here is my problem:

I'm a swing trader, and every day now i feel more and more confused about what I should do. If I'm in a position, I cant figure when to get out, and if I'm trying to get in, I have a hard time knowing what's the right price to buy/short. Here is a quote from Elder.


-----
Come into my trading room

"Amateurs grab a single timeframe, most often daily, apply their indicators and ignore other timeframes. This works until a major move swells up from the weeklies or a sharp spike erupts from the hourly charts" pg 130
----


I feel, because of Elder, this is why I'm not as good a trader as I should be. For those of you that read my journal, it's obvious something is wrong. I have four different charts I look at. Daily, 15 min, 60 min, and weekly. I feel that if I dont have all these charts up, I'm going to suffer the consequence as Elder said in the above text that i made bold font.

---

"The problem with losers is that their decision making process is a mess. To resolve the problem of conflicting timeframes, you should not get your face closer to the market, but push yourself further away" pg 131

---

Obviously this is not yet working for me. I look at daily charts more than anything, but weekly seems TOO long.

Maybe my problem is that I dont have a solid holding period????

The reason I dont have a definite holding period is because I need to be flexible, and move with the market, not against it.

Telling myself that I'm going to buy XYZ and hold for "x" number of days I think is too strict for a trader.

However if you are flexible, you'll ride out the whipsaws and ride the stock in the desired direction.

This is why I look at so many timeframes. I want to know what has happened, and what could happen whether its 15 minutes from now or a week from now.

...but thats just part of the problem.

On the four charts I have up, I have over 12 indicators. It wears me down mentally, but I get lost with out them.

Daily (4 months):
* volume
* 50 EMA
* 15 SMA (high)
* 15 SMA (low)
* 20 SMA
* 7 SMA

15 minute (16 days):
* volume
* 7 SMA
* 15 SMA
* CCI (parameter set to 15)
* MACD

60 minute (8 weeks):
* 15 SMA
* BB's (with 20 ma)
* volume
* MACD

Weekly (4 years):
* 7, 15 SMA's
* 50 EMA
* BB's with 20 ma
* volume
* MACD
* ADX

without my indicators:

1. how do I tell if a stock is over priced?
2. How can I see crossovers without MA's and macd?
3. How can I tell where a price is heavily supported without volume?
4. How can I tell if the stock is going to reverse or continue its trend without MACD?
5. How can I tell how strong a trend is without ADX


The bottom line:

I'm lost. When I make a trade, its just a gut feeling.
 
I just read this entire thread.

It was awesome.

I'm in the same place cm69 was when he made this thread, except instead of normal indicators that appear under the chart, I seem to have a fetish for the different MAs and their slopes. I'm obsessed with setting the colors of my candlesticks to be based on the slope of one or more MAs or a custom programmed derivative that is a function of many slopes combined.

Why am I obsessed with that?

Because I can input code to do whatever I want and then I can look at any historical data I want and see, based on the colors of the candles, exactly where I would have entered and exited.

I can zoom out on my chart. Is the majority of the upward movement green? Is the majority of the downward movement red?

I can zoom in and see every entry down to the tick. I can backtest relatively easily and forward test super easily.

Every "system" I've come up with based on this is completely mechanical. There's no question on whether to enter or not. Sometimes there's an element I can't program such as "is the last low higher than the low before that?" but that's easy enough to look at and see.


Anyway, even tho some of those have forward tested with positive expectancy, I'm still not confident enough to use real money on them.

So now I'm playing with countertrend stuff. MACD crossed upward over the 0 line? Go short. There's always a down candlestick when that happens before the rally resumes (if it resumes at all).


I love how everyone is all "price action!!! you don't need indicators!" Yet it's never defined. What is price action? Memorizing patterns? Memorizing candlestick formations? Memorizing chart shape + volume? Reading the DOM (which I've stared at for hours a day while watching the charts and I don't see any patterns or useful information in it at all. Numbers just change a lot. Big numbers come and go. What?).

Anyway just bumping this 2 year old thread cuz it was helpful to me.
 
Quote from IronFist:

Etc .. instead of normal indicators that appear under the chart, I seem to have a fetish for the different MAs and their slopes. I'm obsessed with setting the colors of my candlesticks to be based on the slope of one or more MAs or a custom programmed derivative that is a function of many slopes combined.

Why am I obsessed with that?

Etc
Often when I look at the posts of wayward traders or wayward would-be-traders venting their frustration against their (hopeless) struggles, I pass on by. When so much is amiss a re-direction into market understanding and a successful methodology is not going to happen.

However I note your search for a system giving you entry signals. Firstly, lets move to a focus of clarity. The money is in the gyrations, that is the intraday sequential upswings and downswings following each other (eg ES, YM, CL). Secondly you are concentrating on MA cross-overs apparently as your signalling system. By themselves MA cross-overs have their limitations.

You can base a successful methodology on a smart use of indicators and clever chart configurations. This could more reasonably take you towards a solution.
:)
 
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