Quote from NoDoji:
There are probably many traders who can trade successfully without a plan, but I found out the hard way that I'm not one of them.
Trading without an exact plan and thinking while trading was, for me, a disaster. It was the cause of all my significant losses and it was the reason I cut winners short. It was the cause of hesitation followed by chasing entries at poor prices, and the cause of jumping the gun in order to keep my stop loss smaller.
I realize now more than ever that Geez was the rarest sort of trader. He had a specific plan based on statistics compiled over time, and the ability to trade it manually like a machine. As soon as he got a valid signal, he placed his order, always adhering to appropriate size based on the R:R. It was amazing how consistent he was at simply trading every valid signal without allowing the result of any trade to influence the next trade in any way, and how he could just leave his trade alone until either the stop or target order was filled.
When I first met him and watched him trade, I thought he was pretty dense because he'd allow trades to come within a penny of his profit target and then stop him out for the full loss. I asked him why he didn't move his stop to break even or just take profit a few pennies less than target if price stalled right there.
And he told me something that I couldn't get my head around at the time because I didn't understand what good trading was about. He told me that his trading is based on specific statistics that demonstrated net profitability over time and if he were to start messing with his stops and targets it would lead him down a slippery slope and skew the odds of his plan.
Even now it's a struggle for me every day to ignore my thoughts about setups. With few exceptions, the hard right edge always feels dangerous and my dear brain steps right up to protect me with thoughts such as "let's watch how price reacts first, then go from there" or "hmmm, it's starting to look a bit weak, why not move your stop to break even just in case".
I've learned that my thoughts are nothing more than protective mechanisms trying to protect me from potential risk. Well, every trade involves risk and trading in general involves uncertainty, and I know from statistical analysis that if I simply trade what I see according to my plan no matter what I think, the outcome of every sufficient series of trades will always be positive (barring a black swan event or technical issues beyond my control).
(A "sufficient" series of trades for me is 10 trades.)