A first break signal bar for an advance range break:

The benefits of "with trend".

Almost Always.

The new demon is:

Do I movemy stop to breakeven?

That has already been answered in bold letters, atleast for this journal: NO!

By waiting patiently, taking only with trend setups and not having anxiety about the outcome there is very little I can do wrong:




And I am not saying that because the trade outcome is a winner....

Reversal is like invention - it successes after so many failures. Inventors pour their lives for it and for community.
Trends are like product of successful invention, naturally using them is wiser than indulging in inventions.

iqgod 

"It must beak to the upside! It MUST! It HAS TO! It WILL!" !!!! Whenever I get into this 100% prediction mode I am back to novice, back to square one.

I had this same issue too. When ever I decided what the market "will do" it was too easy for me to "make up" a trade that matches my decision and does not match all my trading criteria. I feel these trades bring your emotions into trading. Since you "decided" what the market must do, you will want to be right about the decision. Sometimes you will be right, but this just sets you up to take another "I decided trade" that will most likely lose because emotions are clouding your judgement. If you were wrong, then you get mad at yourself for deciding what will happen. You know better and should not do that. Again, emotions coming into trading and building as you trade.



What are you using for trend definition? I use the Volume off of a 5 minute chart to set the trend direction and I'm trying to get myself to only trade in my trend direction. The Red or Green diamonds are where I'm defining the trend. Only after having profits to risk should I allow my self a counter trend trade.




I'm working through some manual back testing this weekend. I trade the ES and feel this definition for trend is working good for my trading style. In my back testing I see some stop runs that give false reversals, but overall this is helping me.

devdas 

Reversal is like invention - it successes after so many failures. Inventors pour their lives for it and for community. Trends are like product of successful invention, naturally using them is wiser than indulging in inventions.

That's a wonderful analogy!

Thanks for that!

Since we are on the subject:

I wanted to "share" something about Thomas Alva Edison. People often conjure up images of an Inventor cum Mad Sceintist who kept working in solitary confinement till his genius bore fruit.

That was far from the truth.

During his most inventive years, Edison conducted experiments at his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. He did not work alone. A team of talented workers assisted him all hours of the day and night. These men had the skills to make Edison's ideas and sketches into real devices of wood, wire, glass, and metal.

Edison's workers came from all over the world. The group included: Charles Batchelor, Edison's chief mechanical assistant from England; Ludwig Boehm, a German glassblower; John Kruesi, a Swiss clockmaker; Francis Upton, a mathematician, as well as carpenters, machinists, and general laboratory helpers.

The laboratory at Menlo Park was an "invention factory" and a business. Bookkeepers and secretaries kept track of the money needed to run the business.

So much for the image of hermit dedicating himself to science.

IN FACT HE TREATED HIS PASSION LIKE A BUSINESS.

This is what we as traders would do to firmly implant into our brains - Trading is FIRST a business. Being a passion ranks somewhere down that list but FIRST it is a BUSINESS.

MarketPilot 

I had this same issue too. When ever I decided what the market "will do" it was too easy for me to "make up" a trade that matches my decision and does not match all my trading criteria. I feel these trades bring your emotions into trading. Since you "decided" what the market must do, you will want to be right about the decision.

I think that was a very important beam of light you cast on my internals.

The need to be right, the spring that feeds the false ego usually is the last barrier to crumble between ourselves and successful trading.

Being willing and prepared to lose, not getting fixated on being right - those are the two most important precepts to build any trading career on.

From Joan Didion’s 1968 anthology 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' comes a wonderful essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook”:

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things.

The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.

It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing.

Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker.

And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

iqgod 

A red trade is a scary thing for me that still kicks in the thought demons. It is a walk in the park when I accept that losing trades are a part of the game. However when a promising reversal bar sets up in this fashion it becomes a HUFFF.... compressed air is released from the lungs relieving you of anxxiety. However such perfect bars (and perfect patterns) mean only one thing - they are created in a way that EVERY participant can see them and postion themselves in the obvious direction after which the big players are free to take out everybody's stops..... So to myself: beware when market action lowers stress i.e. when you allow the market to regulate your thinking instead of guide it.

The "Red Trade" comment sounds like you may not have complete faith in the trades you take. You sound so much like me just a few weeks back. I had to fine tune both my entry criteria and trend determination. Even after making these changes I found I was performing a similar behavior. I could see it during my daily trade reviews. Sometimes half of my trades would not meet my trade criteria. Worse yet, these were usually the majority of my losing trades.

I finally convinced myself to ONLY take trades that really match my trade criteria. When a trade goes against me, I look at market internals to decide if I might be wrong or if this is just a stop run and I should stay in the trade. Consistency followed with these changes. The biggest change was I stopped worrying when placing a trade and now feel good that I'm trading to meet my plan. This matters more than if the trade is profitable. This made a huge emotional change for me.

I always felt my system would work, but found it was hard to get myself to trade my own system the way I defined the trades. I did the same things I hear you saying:

• Hesitated on Entering Trades
• Took Reversal Trades too often

Break those bad behaviors and your trading will change drastically for the better.

Very good posts. I always say - test, test and test. You should be very confident in what you are doing. And this is coming from disciplined practice.