The One Thing That Changed Everything In Your Trading

http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Zone-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280542022&sr=1-1

Quote from tradingjournals:

What is the One Thing That Changed Everything In Your Trading? It is actually the things that changed everything in your trading. I am posing it that way so that you select only the best things, with a focus on the one thing that led to the "HaHa moment".

The one thing could be an insight, an observation, an idea, a thought, a book, a thread, a blog, a mentor, luck, etc.

It is "the one thing that changed everything" in your trading world.

I was chatting to a friennd who is new to trading (newbie who wants to have fun in trading with the intent to maybe take it more seriously if it makes money). I got a sense that my friend views trading as only/mainly buying and selling transactions, but what I want the friend to FIRST see is that the task of a trader is to locate upsides that are worth on average more than the downside, and to earn the different as a result of his labor/insight/risk taking.

If this sounds trivial to you, I am not convinced my friend sees it yet. The day when my friend sees , I am thinking I will get a question such as "this is gambling", or a more profound one, "why would anyone sells to me an upside that is worth more than the downside on average, as this would be in contradiction with markets which should price this out". When that day comes, I will share with you what my answer would be, but you can tell me what I should answer my friend, and also what you think are the one things that will change my friend's view on trading.
Please make them as items in a priority list.

I did not want to tell my friend all the other steps, otherwise my friend may give up. What do you think?
More...
 
I pretty much started out as an IBD fan (had to start somewhere) I loved t/a.

Then next up put the t/a on the back burner and focused on fundamentals, for this I needed help.

After about 2 years of that I couldn't present an arguement on how the fundamentals were not going to play out according to their score card. They were wrong and I ended up being right. Of course I never told anyone. It was just a feeling.

Now about this feeling. I spent time on the psychology of the market and this is where I found my home. This is not to say t/a and fundies don't play a part, they do, but now it's a cocktail.

Everyone is different, so while we may arrive with the same conclusions, we all use a different map.

I don't believe it's "one thing", more like a process of elimination.
 
Quote from tradingjournals:

What is the One Thing That Changed Everything In Your Trading? It is actually the things that changed everything in your trading. I am posing it that way so that you select only the best things, with a focus on the one thing that led to the "HaHa moment".

The one thing could be an insight, an observation, an idea, a thought, a book, a thread, a blog, a mentor, luck, etc.

It is "the one thing that changed everything" in your trading world.

I was chatting to a friennd who is new to trading (newbie who wants to have fun in trading with the intent to maybe take it more seriously if it makes money). I got a sense that my friend views trading as only/mainly buying and selling transactions, but what I want the friend to FIRST see is that the task of a trader is to locate upsides that are worth on average more than the downside, and to earn the different as a result of his labor/insight/risk taking.

If this sounds trivial to you, I am not convinced my friend sees it yet. The day when my friend sees , I am thinking I will get a question such as "this is gambling", or a more profound one, "why would anyone sells to me an upside that is worth more than the downside on average, as this would be in contradiction with markets which should price this out". When that day comes, I will share with you what my answer would be, but you can tell me what I should answer my friend, and also what you think are the one things that will change my friend's view on trading.
Please make them as items in a priority list.

I did not want to tell my friend all the other steps, otherwise my friend may give up. What do you think?
More...

The one thing that changed my trading is when I realized this: Markets can do only 2 things, they continue, or they change.
 
Quote from RCG Trader:

The one thing that changed my trading is when I realized this: Markets can do only 2 things, they continue, or they change.
More...

Do I understand the implication of it correctly: go long the continuation, and get out if there is a change (and do not guess, etc). First leads to the profits, the second leads to costs.
 
There is no 'one' thing that will change your trading. It's a combination of things.

All of them together (in sync) is what takes you to the next level.
 
NM makes a good point



He labels it is a process…., I label it a journey – same difference….


I can guarantee I didn’t wake up one day and say – okay today I will think like this…

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I went through a lot of trial and error; read trading in the zone (four times)… even rewrote each chapter so I understood it.

Read numerous other books, attended a formal class, studied FA & TA, … Journaled – till I was blue in the face… Blew up a couple of times…, started over more than once… laid my charts bare and stared at them for weeks on end…yada…yada…yada…

btw I found the – cut winners short, let losers run – period of my trading quite enjoyable… HA

But through it all I continued – and one day it clicked…

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So I would like to amend my original explanation and say...

The one thing that changed my trading is perseverance… and I think all successful traders share it…

RN
 
one thing that changed everything in my trading is position sizing based on reasonable risk parameters. basically everything was working ok for me until i reached the point in my trading when overconfidence lead me to ignore my previous risk parameters. a couple of bad trades (well, more than a couple) quickly followed and seriously damaged my account.

now i again believe in setting up reasonable risk parameters. we shall see how it goes...
 
My experience has not been a "one thing that changed everything in my trading" on this day mm/dd/yyyy forward. Rather, the journey has been a gradual transformation from one discovery to another discovery.

I believe all knowledge is a gradual build-up. New knowledge that is based on old knowledge and then some. I am a math and astronomy fan. So let me provide an analogy to my trading skill development:

The ancient Greeks developed geometry and algebra
Introducing the Arabic numbers and the concept of zero
... fast forward...
Copernicus’s theory: Earth around the Sun instead of the other way around.
Sir Issac Newton discovered the law of gravity and invented calculus.
We discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which revolve around in our Milky Way, which is only one of the many billions of galaxies rapidly expanding...
Albert Einstein introduced that time and space are used together, relativity
Stephen Hawking's theories on black holes
Now the development of many theories such as the Superstring theories, parallel universies, dark matter, dark energies, the Big Bang theory and so on...

You see... with each new discovery, we seem to gain a higher level of knowledge but it is based on prior knowledge. We just understand the details a little more or understand the generality or special cases and boundary conditions.

In my view: Trading skills are like that too. You first thought you understood how the market moved. But started to observe some anomalies. Then you came to a higher level of understanding that accounted for the "anomalies". Then you developed better skills. The process iterates when you observe more anomalies with your higher level of understanding.
 
The day -or year - that I stopped fighting the market was the turning point for me.
Really, the market is going where it wants to go. I'm sure there are those here that can predict it's direction but I'm not one of them. Sometimes the smartest thing is to just
say, "I don't know".
JMO
 
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