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Secret Strategy and Needing to Connect with Others
Psychology Related To Keeping Your Strategy Secretive and the Feeling the Need to Connect With Others
I’ve been pondering this for a couple years. Why is it we as traders keep our methods to ourselves like a secret technique? I mean we toss the general idea out let your winners run, cut your losers short, watch S&R. I mean you can go out and buy a system or learn from someone else, but you really can’t implement if you don’t believe in it and don’t practice it. I mean the markets wouldn’t move the way they do if we weren’t all doing something similar. I guess that’s why there is dumb money and smart money. If there wasn’t a buy side or sell side we’d be standing in place. To me this is what I’ve come too, is it more or less the thought, well I figured it out on my own you should too.
Also, I notice that a lot of folks on these forums like to connect or have a sense of urgency to connect with other folks. I mean I guess it’s normal, but I’m still trying to figure out why we as humans have this urge to seek approval from other people or get validated.
I’m just trying to understand the theme behind it because I see it all the time. I’m still trying to embrace the lone wolf thing. Over the last few years I’ve really learned a lot about myself and am working slowly to change many of the beliefs that I don’t really believe in or that I find useless. It’s a slow process.
I guess it really probably just gets back to the way we were all raised. Some people like to help and others and some could care less. Some folks are needier than others…..
Any thoughts behind this would be greatly appreciated.
I get bored when trading so I frequent trading forums so that I can converse with others that have some interest in trading.
So far I haven’t found anyone who trades the same as I do. I have had several people ask for help but when I explain that it requires a lot of work on their part the interest falls off pretty quickly.
What that tells me is that every trader has to figure it out for themselves. The theory as you say is simple. Buy low/ sell high; cut losses quickly and let the winners run. Unfortunately humans find this almost impossible to do.
Too many yabuts / what if?
"The days when I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, I have really good days" RW Hubbard
Probably because no one wants to share their hard earned work with some random
Person who hasn't gone through the hardships of trading
Also fear of system being arbitraged for sharing with to many
Also some systems aren't that complex especially when order flow is involved.
And as far a sharing with other traders your win essentially that's all
About validating ones years of figuring it out.
I share because it's in my nature. I believe the more you share, the more you are open to receiving. Can't keep taking and taking all the time. That never works out well. My therapist once told me "You'll never be wealthy. You give it all away." Well, not ALL of it. It's also probably an ego thing. The same reason millions post pictures of what they're eating at their favorite restaurant - on Facebook! Or where they're going, or where they've been. Really....how sad. At least this way, I may (may!) help someone on their trading journey and may, in return be helped along on mine. It's been said, one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. I've learned more from others' feedback when sharing my setups / systems than I have from all the webinars in the world. I say keep on giving!
After all, it's what you learn AFTER you know it all, that counts!
I have been following the thread from JDNeeman on the [AUTOLINK]ATM[/AUTOLINK] method, that was closed at some point by @Big Mike because @JDNeeman became a vendor. However there was a method, tools, indicators, training and daily explanation, I followed it and i tried it. Putting my own flavor to the method, not blindly copying it.
I have been actively posting my trades to the new thread which was vendor free and i noticed that there was the need for more than just the method. The naked method sometimes worked and sometimes failed. Hard to tell if profit or not, then you try to do some improvisation, take more risk and are able to post a profit or not.
Last week I followed a great webinar by Kevin Davey, test for succes and I asked myself, can i make a programm to test the ATM strategy and come up with statistics, what works, what does not work.
What are the best setups, the highest chance % setups ?
If i am ultimately able to create an automated strategy then that's completely awesome...
It was like I had seen the light or at least wanted to give this a chance.
I shared my hard work, people commented.
I have no problem sharing, i gave my work **free** to others, it allowed me to learn from the comments of others
Unless you are a guru and make consistently (big) money, know everything and can be a profitable trader in your corner, you can do your thing, others can not bring any value, or less than what you are giving.
But 99% and more on the forum need to learn a lot...
I am happy the forum exists, I am happy to share and I am happy with what i learned
It costed < 5% of the indicators i bought and i got real positive results out of the things i learned
and downloaded on the forum, which i can not confirm on the indicators i bought
and the trading rooms i followed.
As long as there is more to learn than you can give, as long there is value to share with people, i would suggest sharing.
I think in practice you can give the best technique in the world to someone and they'll fail utterly at applying it.
The real secret to this business is the mentality, to be comfortable performing intuitively un-natural actions in the market. In my experience people love the idea of money so they are drawn to the field and then they disappear when they see the effort required to be consistent. Truth is with the graft and right psychological make-up anyone can do it, but in reality only a small percentage of folks have that psychological wiring. That's were I think the old 90% fail cliche is derived from.
In that sense the secrecy is a false endeavor in the end, as for a lot of people the open collaboration is a better tool. A lot of material I read is completely missing this point, and that's why I find this venue very refreshing as its a great centre of free collaboration.
I was just trying to figure out why folks in general are so secretive about their strategies. I get the concept of I developed or went through the learning process and so should you. I know even if we all explained it to a new trader they still wouldn’t understand it even after they were given a strategy or book. It takes time to see how you trade a bull bias or a bear bias. Then on top of that, the hardest part is being disciplined. It takes time to know what all that means. Overall, we have to figure all that out ourselves.
Desire to communicate; I guess at times I feel like I need to communicate with folks. I keep finding myself bouncing back and forth between this. I’m pretty much an introvert when it comes to other folks other than the trading community and my wife. I can be an extrovert when required. I guess I’m trying to figure out why at times I have this need of belonging to something (part of human nature I guess). I’m thinking this relates to my childhood upbringing and the overall nature of our societies. Overall, I guess we all want to connect; some folks need it more than others. I’m just trying to embrace the lone wolf mentality.
Helping others I guess I am one that just likes to help, in trading, in general I guess since money is involved most don’t like to help. I mean with futures.io (formerly BMT) folks throw-out ideas and such, but I haven’t really seen much collaboration overall I guess since this is an individual sport like golf.
I guess maybe this post was unnecessary, and I answered my questions, but I was more or less looking for thoughts on those three areas. I apologise for such a vague post.
That’s a good question. I can see a successful trader keeping his method under his hat in the fear that if too many people start to employ his method he might lose his edge.
What I can’t understand is struggling traders not revealing their strategy. Are they afraid that others will steal their method and lose huge amounts of money?
The only thing I can think of is either they don’t have a strategy to share or they have a strategy that works but don’t have the discipline to follow it and by revealing the strategy will prove that the problem is the trader not the strategy.
"The days when I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, I have really good days" RW Hubbard
