I finally decided to start 2017 with a public journal. I have been posting my daily trades on youtube since december last year.
I have spend more than 4 years studying price action trading and blew out several accounts along the way. I probably dedicated most of my time studying Al Brooks price action (books and trading room archive rewatching for more than a year) althought currently I dont consider myself trading his setups. I respect his work and efforts.
I also spend more than a year only focused on the price ladder and order book, starring at the ES ladder (through fantastic Jigsaw software) and the times and sales I still watch just for fun.
Last year 2016 I went through all my records - several textbooks with loads of random notes of observations and quotes from teachers webinars etc etc., I read multiple times my trading mistakes and errors in my paper journals.
Most of my mistakes were the usual trading struggles - jumping from setup to setup, changing strategy on the fly, widening stops to avoid losses, adding to trades going against me, and adding, and adding and puking, overtrading, scalping and changing the trade to swing, swinging and instead holding - scalping the profit. I used to have problems with patience and waiting.
My main change came from Mark Douglas books and interviews I saw on youtube.
When I finally come in peace and fully grasped the true that "anything can happen" and market is random it changed my perspective and I got rid of many of above issues. I believe the market is fully random - its a mix of hundreds and thousands of traders trading different strategies and protecting or sabotaging their interests with unknown capital behind for each others and also more unknown capital sitting aside flat waiting to enter.
The second thing that helped me completely overcome many issues is thinking for my trades in %ages. I think for every trade as really small and insignificant % off a series of trades. The probability distribution is random as well and we cant know if next trade will likely be winner or loser - the probability is 50/50.
I give up the idea of being in "the know", knowing what will happen next, feeling how "the market is precise", expecting patterns "to work", expecting "this to happen", or they "have to" come back, I completely deleted all this crap of my head.
It is hard, I still catch myself thinking in old ways sometimes, making old mistakes, but generally I removed the whole pressure of "NEED the trade to work", "need to make it work", need to prove my ability, need for certainty which makes traders add many indicators and confirmations and to study and study and study many useless things.
Last year I created the next demo account and started trading. My strategy is extremely simple and not pretending (although you often will see a mess of lines on my screen to remind me all is a random unpredictable mess!!!).
I like the pitchfork and gann fan (1x8 line) tools - please note - I use them for measurements and just consider them as a lines to have some measuring point - for my risk and possibly reward ahead (although i hate putting targets, I still do measure possibilities ahead, but my main goal is to sit on my hands as much as possible and run the trades more).
I am not even sure whats the idea behind Gann fan - it seems that often failures off 1x8 line just lead to big moves - its like measuring the extremes of the day, I discovered them by simply playing with every geometry tool in the NinjaTrader and Multicharts. I do not rely on them as some people will call them "leading indicators", they are just a measuring points for me.
I wasnt keen to journal in futures.io because I guess many people will respond or ask questions why I do that or that. And this will take time which I dont have much last days. But what happened. One day - I didnt record my trades (my mate told me my videos are so long!!) so I said ok I will not record today - I was behaving like the old messy destructive …