What are(were) your most common mistakes in Trading?

bone said:
I can tell you what the most ruinous mistake is - adding to losers.
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And on the top, when that 5 years support line turns into ressitance and falling knife beggins, adding bit more long, because

bounce is ,,about to happen".
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My mistakes :

* Position sizing
* Going against the trend
* & few dozens more

@orbit23 - nice list in the beginning. Should be a must read before opening a brokerage account.
 
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Mistakes (All inadvertent)
-Setting entry a tick beyond or before the correct entry level.
-Setting target a tick beyond or before the correct target level.
-Entering trade with wrong # of contracts.
-Getting triggered by a limit / stop limit order (which I meant to cancel).
-Forgetting it's a fed day, and still in position @ 1400 EST. (I call it a day at 1330)

Behaviors
-Skipping valid trades. Because I was thinking "for sure this next one has to be a loser!"
-Taking non-valid, "impulsive" trades. This often happened right after I skipped/missed a valid winning trade. I would get so mad, and then focus on getting back to "even" (the amount I'd be at, had I not have skipped/missed the winner.)

The mistakes are frustrating, but rare. I shrug them off quickly.
The behaviors are expensive and stressful. Consistent profit eluded me until I got a grip on behavior.
 
Mine: sniffing too much “hope-ium” when in a trade. Moving stops to give myself more wiggle room in hopes that a losing trade would magically turn around. Just wound up turning small losers into bigger ones.
 
In the beginning----Talking to other traders, 96% don't know chit and the 1% won't give you chit time of the day, but they have ego's the size of my arse. So took me awhile to chat with the 3% skinny arse's who were making a little or gotten to breakeven and struggling to get to 7 figures and beyond.

Letting my brain make decisions when market is open and thereby going against the back tested brain.

Ok to average down so long as you have 20 years of emergency money in secured fashion, otherwise you don't know chit.

Pretty much what all have written down, only I didn't learn from my mistakes in beginning, I liked doing same dumb entries, exits and in between several times, glutton for punishment.

I often thought in beginning years my Tombstone should read "I am soooo close" and of course didn't know chit and had more years to go.

What is very amusing to me now that I understand, I should have understood 40 plus years ago, but what deemed as doable simple now, we can't believe in the beginning it be this way. Of course definition of simple is 100,000 hours of screen time, no wonder I have had cataract surgery in both eyes.
 
You can screw up again and again and still come out alright as long as you have a good money management (eg. small stop loss) in place. It's when you violate this cardinal principle, you turn what would have been a small loss into an avalanche.

BTW you can average up but never average down. Only idiots with big ego will do that.
 
easymon1 said:
mr orbit23

mine lately - lack of focus while futzing with elitetrader, lol.
which of course leads naturally to missing entry triggers.
there's two.

measured error log valuable as a trade log.

hey, the list you've made - if you could eliminate the four most destructive of the bunch, which four would those be?

salute!
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Lack of focus is a big problem for me, not only in trading, but life in general. And i've noticed this only just recently, realizing that for most of my life, i had rarely ever been in the present moment. My mind quickly wanders away and i get caught up in thoughts - daydreaming.
Perhaps i'm wrong on this one, but from my recent studies/experimentation, i believe that the holy grail of staying focus is to be self aware - aware of the distraction. You have to notice the distraction as soon as possible and just let it go.
That's it. Notice the distraction, let it go, then bring attention back to whatever you were doing.
It takes practice, but that's one of the main areas i've been working on lately. Literally everyone who's achieved something worthy, will tell you that sustained focus is the key.

Looking back at the list right now, those are mostly the small mistakes that i continue to make and are needed to improve my trading.
The biggest flaws would be:

  • Not letting the winners run/taking profits quickly when HTF trend is strong
  • Big losses
  • Having a strong bias as to what i think will happen(instead of just trading the chart)
  • Not listening to myself/intuition

The problem with all of the mistakes is that they pretty much contradict each other. For example i will be right for prolonged period of time(if the trend is strong, pretty much every dip you buy-you will be right), then i will over-estimate my capabilities, i will think i know what is going to happen, i will bet big and the market will reverse and dump on me. Then i will get frustrated, i will doubt my capabilities, but my intuition tells me, WHEN WRONG - FLIP POSITION, but i am too afraid of doing so because i just lost and it's kinda mentally devastating. Only to see the market crash hard soon after. Then i will get frustrated for not listening to myself and it all just leads into more bad decisions.

Also for example - not letting the winners run. You notice the trend is STRONG and it's going up hard. You want to position yourself BIGLY for the breakout. You get in the position, your uPNL is +400$ on a small move up within 30minutes, you say to yourself. I'm going to make a shit ton of monney here, this is gonna burst up hard, i WILL NOT be taking profits quickly. And the market makes one final shakeout and those 400$ literally disappear in 20seconds, stopping you out(if lucky) at breakeven. But then you realize, hey we haven't been invalidated yet, and you re-enter the position, then you make some profits and you say to yourself: "i don't want to see the PNL disappear again, i will take profits this time" and then soon after the market bursts up without you and you shed a tear.
 
Definitely my biggest mistake was thinking that all the psychological skills needed for trading were going to simply be a result of learning more about markets or finding the holy grail of systems. Also, not sticking to one good strategy - you can't expect consistent outcomes from erratic actions.

Once I actually read Trading in The Zone and learned how to accept the kind of thinking I had to have when trading, things got a whole lot better and now I actually do have a very good decision-making system, which I started applying this very week and for the first time I ended a week positively.
 
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