Quote from TradingBillions:
Look, you're right. I am a loser trader. I should just rename my nickname to theWorstTraderEver. How's that sound? Everytime I make what I think is a high probability bet on a trade It usually turns the opposite way. I don't know why but it does. Lovely, huh?
Anyway, I should have just followed the trend on the euro fx as there is just another volume spike sending this baby wayyyy up to the sky as i was going short. sweeet!
I just need to be beaten up to realize why i keep messing up trade after trade. your right i'm unworthy for a mentor..
People will help you when you ask constructive questions. I'll give my opinions on trades you post, though I'm a tape reader, so I probably can't help too much if you're trading purely off the squigglies. Just post trades, why you think they would work, and see what people say. Don't obsess over the concept of having an individualized mentor; instead, let everyone on ET who wants to contribute to your development as a trader respond with their opinions when you ask constructive, meaningful questions. Then, you may pickup several successful traders who continually answer your questions in a mentor-like fashion, which will allow you to gain more than you ever could by having a single mentor talk to you over PMs.
Keep your head up, remember everyone was a losing trader... at the same time, remember the market owes you nothing and doesn't care about you, and that that's not a bad thing at all. The market is just neutral. It WILL teach you what your mistakes are; you have to be receptive to the lessons. Being someone who has a mentor myself, I can tell you that 90% of the work I've done to reach the (very, very minimal) level of success I've reached has been purely from understanding my own psychology and from having "ah-ha" moments where I applied exactly what I intuitively knew I should with perfection. A mentor only helped keep me off the wrong path, kept me from wasting time with methods which had no chance of working, and pointed out my most painful mistakes.
This is also my bias, because I'm a very, very short term trader, but I think the shorter the timeframe you trade on, the faster you can learn. I'm sure daytrading is harder than position or swing trading, but it also gives you more lessons; you can make 20-30 trades/day daytrading, and maybe only 2-3 per day swing trading. At the stage you're in, each trade is like a lesson. Getting 10x the lessons will definitely improve the rate at which you succeed, and daytrading will also help you gain a higher awareness of the price action. I can sit down and watch a stock trade for 2-3 hours on end and pick up subtleties in how the stock is trading and who is doing what with it that I would never have been able to pickup a few months ago; some of these give me clues I can use to figure out where a stock will be 2-3 hours from now, even though my usual timeframe for a trade is ~45 seconds. I'm trying to actually slowly drift towards a longer timeframe, as I find that my very, very short-term timeframed entries can actually be excellent entries for longer-term trades; this is because watching the market all day has taught me the fundamentals of why price moves... and while I still may pay too much attention to what an intraday position trader might call noise, I get better daily at sorting that out. I think it's easier to learn the longer timeframes after knowing the micro timeframes, but I'm sure many others - with far, far more experience and P/L to boot - will disagree with me.