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1. You need to journal your trades.
2. You need to journal your thoughts before taking a trade, while in a trade?
what were you thinking when the trade went against you?
Were you praying for the loss to reduce so you can take it?
Did you commit to yourself that if price breaches this low/high you'll get out and didn't?
3. You need to look at charts and see the context a market is in. Just knowing the technical aspects of chart/pattern trading is NOT useful. Context is the key. A hammer formed at bottom of a move V/s top of move is conveying totally different message.
4. Is your mentor making money only while the market is uni-directional or is he really a pro in various market conditions?
5. Explain your trades and the rational behind you taking it to a person - this helps as you realize if your approach has some gaps.
You may share your orders and have your mentor analyze it for you.
Technical analysis is not really that difficult to learn.
It mostly comes to psychological issues.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Here is what I think after 35 years trading and making way more than my share of all the wrong trades LOL:
Looking at the price action (any time frame, any bar format whatever does not matter) what we see is the result of looking for reinforcement for price movement continuing in the direction it is currently moving. OK so we have momentum here right? That is good.
Except the current 5m bar has 13 seconds left on it, bar range is 32 points, and a buy here, while it looks like a slam-dunk, is anything but. The probability is that the algos are going to have price overlapping the previous bar the vast majority of the time, which means that buy is instantly under water just from the spread on the bid-offer first, and then from price moving against us next. Damn it wrong again? Shoulda sold instead of bot?
What I am implying here is that we traders must train ourselves to trade the test and not the confirmation. Looking for trades against tests of previous bar ends. A complete sea-change in the way we all naturally think about price action. Because that is the way the algos are written. And even then there are going to inevitably be times that trades don't work, and that is not an indictment against your intelligence or "need to be right". Basically a lot of times the market just trades irrationally, and it is just what it is. Irrational. Certainly zero basis in actual verifiable fundamentals, what with the intrusive focus on everything the federal reserve says or does. We all end up trading what we think everyone else thinks the fed will or will not do LOL.
Anyway, studying price action for many years reveals that there is some logic in what is happening and how it moves. Some at least. Maturity in learning to be disciplined to stay away from the choppy crap that destroys trading accounts, and stay on the occasional great trending move where the market wants to pay you to trade it.
Finally, no one can teach you risk tolerance. No one. Indicators will not increase your risk tolerance. Beware spending major dollars trying to glean success from a charlatan who claims to be a guru. The fact is that in the end, the success you realize, happened because you put in the work. The blood, sweat, and tears. OK maybe a bit dramatic but I will guarantee you this is the truth. I struggle every day with all the same stuff all you guys struggle with, but it does get easier to do the right thing at the right time eventually. And most of all, to REALLY ACCEPT THE RISK IN ALL TRADES.
Sorry to disturb the flow a little, but I do feel in this particular case Pariah Carey is right. To the point it actually sounds little hurtful on surface but if listened carefully OP can save lot of future trouble for himself.
I don't think the OP has any real strategy with edge and if he has one it sounds like its either not suited for him or he is taking trades which are not there.
And as bobwest has said, it happens, has happened to many of us and will keep happening, but what we do from that point is go back to drawing board and create a new strategy, backtest it enough to demonstrate the edge and then draw confidence from it to trade a small real money account.
He is also lucky that Kevindog is personally replying to him, probably his time could be worth in gold in this case
Agreed, including the part about Kevin, and also agree with @Pariah Carey in this respect: people often have to face whether they are going to be a trader or not, and it is in the face of failure that the decision is made. If at that point you don't say, "Who the hell's a loser?" and get up and make something happen, then it is better to just stop. Not everyone is going to be able to do it, but there's a decision to make there. Making that decision to change won't do it either, by the way, but without it there is no chance. Persistence and grit are not enough by themselves, but they are necessary for anything else to happen.
So either change your screen name, change your attitude, decide to dig into what you are doing when you trade -- not what is being done to you -- and change it, grind through it until it changes, if need be, or find something else that you like and that you will consider fun, and do that.
So I said before that we all go through these bad spells, and that you are not alone, and that is true. This is the other part of it: change what you are doing, however you need to, or do something else.
And still, good luck.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
There is no correlation, not to mention causation, between "intelligence" (whatever that means) and "success in trading". Trading is, to a large extent, a set of skills anyone can develop, though not easily (also, "intelligence", strange as it sounds, can be a disadvantage.) E.g. trading involves the skill of tolerating a high level of discomfort, every time we're in a trade. Like walking on fire or being a surgeon: not for everyone. Another skill would be to learn to think in probabilities in some novel ways, something homo sapiens is not good at. So to be a trader, you have to be ready to develop skills that few people have or want to have, or even know exist. IMHO.
Well said and 100% accurate as well. The dirty little secret to trading is that it boils down to REALLY assuming the risk on trades. Goes without saying that a good robust strategy is also necessary. One without the other will not get you winning with enough consistency to stay in the game. Of the two, being able to take the risk is probably more important.
He and I would spend the trading day in a Google Chat room, often sharing screens. I was able to watch him place orders, while watching the chart and options prices through my platform. I'm certain of his success, but for some reason I was never able to replicate it. I did not want to simply puppet trade. I spent hundreds of hours back-testing on my platform, and hundreds more paper trading. It feels like there was something more that he was seeing that I still do not know about.
A friend of mine who is starting out in trading sent this video to me and asked me what I thought. The premise of the video is what would I do different if I had to start over in day trading. Overall it’s solid honest advice. It hits many key points which FIO members have been saying for years. If you’re new or struggling its worth a watch IMO.
