PandaWarrior 

I like all in all out because of the math... I like confirmation, it makes me feel better about my directional thinking. I would rather not catch a falling knife so to speak. I like moving stops, it makes me feel better in the moment... Feeling better in the moment does not seem to be working all that well. Stripping things down to the bare essentials I come up with: 1. I can continue to leave my entries alone and modify things by scaling out. This gets some profit on the table and I can leave the stop alone so if hit, its a break even trade. This is easy to implement. 2. I can modify the entry so confirmation is no longer something I use. This introduces a new level of uncertainty, but it does get my stops much further away from the action....and potentially can allow me a break even stop without worrying to much about it being hit, plus it could add another 20+ ticks to my profit potential. This would be difficult for me to implement as it would require more waiting than I'm used to and it would require i revise my entry technique more than perhaps I'd like to at this point. 3. I can eliminate confirmation and scale out and potentially scale back in if given the opportunity. This would be the hardest to implement I think. It would require an entirely new way of thinking about trading. 4. I can man up and keep things exactly the way they are and simply not move the stop. This is the simplest to implement as it requires no further modification. But this has not worked so far. 5. Lastly I can explain myself to my wife and the reason she's not driving the new car she'd like. And then make a daily report to her about how I actually traded. I wonder about the wisdom of this but personal accountability can go a long way towards behavior change. I have the weekend to think about it. I'll decide by Sunday night.....

Hard choices. I wouldn't even think of trying to say what you should do. I couldn't possibly know.

But I would suggest making the fewest changes, on a fundamental level, that are possible. Big changes are going to be very hard to make successfully.

That undeniable fact may help in finding a satisfactory answer....

Good luck with this.

Bob.

The Profit on CNBC believes in People, Products and Process.....

And in this game, the product is the market we trade, the process is how we see the market, the decision making matrix we use and how we enter and exit the market.

The people is of course us....

As is usually the case, the people involved is more than likely the most broken piece of the puzzle, next is the process, it might or might not be broken....for this exercise we will assume the process is more or less good and valid. The product we will also assume is both acceptable and static, meaning we will not make changes to it.

With that in mind, it appears as we already knew the process and product are fine.....its the people (me) that cannot follow the process.

With that in mind, as a first step, I've brought in my wife to act as a process monitor. At the end of each trading session, I must give her a blow by blow account of how I did or did not follow the process. She is the only one to whom I really have accountability. I can journal here and in my blog but there is no accountability to anyone....and it appears I can use a health dose of this....

Secondly, there has been and will be an ongoing process of acceptance. Of surrender. I cannot control the market or what it does. I know this with my head....but my heart has not accepted it fully. Today I fully accept this fact....and tomorrow I will say it again. It will be an ongoing daily verbal acknowledgement of the reality of what IS, NOT what I want it to be.

Change does not happen without acknowledgement and acceptance of of what IS.....and as the people variable of the people+process+product formula, getting the people to accept the failure, the break down, the conflict that exists within them, that they are the problem......this is what IS.....instead of hoping for what might BE.....acceptance of what IS.

Once that is done, change can happen quickly and with what might be seen as a quantum leap forward.

I'm leaning toward making no changes in my tactics.....only just letting the market do what its gonna do....and bringing my wife into the process of course. Accepting the outcome as what was supposed to happen....let it flow....I suspect this is the correct but narrow way....it leads to success....I choose the narrow path.

It's gonna be a daily walking out of this acceptance and a daily acknowledgement of my inability to control the market or to force my will on it and a daily surrendering of my need for control. Its a step I'm willing to make....on faith.

Tomorrow I'll finalize tactics (if any changes are made), note any further thoughts or aha moments that come....for now, I'm at peace.

PandaWarrior 

I feel like shit today. My Achilles heel is this....moving those damn stops to soon.....stupid thing is I know I do it but can't stop myself. At the end of the day, I see what could have been had I just done NOTHING.....I even put my targets in good places....it seems I know HOW to find ENTRIES and EXITS, but dealing with the emotion in between is becoming a serious issue. Each time it happens, I tell myself like a good repentant alcoholic that tomorrow will be DIFFERENT. That tomorrow I won't move the damn stops....that tomorrow I will walk away. That tomorrow I will be the trader I know I can be...... And tomorrow comes and I don't move the stops and I get taken out for a loss....then the next day I move the stops and once again, I find myself on the sidelines watching while price moves toward my targets....and remain the trader I AM. Today for instance, I sold in a near perfect location....after around 28-30 MFE, I moved to BE, thinking, CL will do its famous 20 tick pull back and I'll have 8-10 ticks of room between me and price.....but today it did a 29 tick pull back and took my stop to the TICK and then sold off for more than 100 ticks..... After a long time, I found another place to get in, and EXACTLY the same thing happened. This time by a few ticks but still, the EXACT same thing. Its time to admit I have a serious problem. Hi, my name is Brian and I am a stop moving aholic. I've been a stop mover since the beginning of my trading career. It has ruined me and I am ready to recover from my addiction. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. How my method produced nice winners if I would just leave them alone. It felt good to write this. I even meant it. But honestly I'm not sure I even followed that plan even once. Well Wednesday I did but what really happened there is I took my kiddo to school and left the trade open....and my targets got hit while I was out....otherwise, who knows what stupidity I might have committed. Today was one of the easiest days to make money in recent memory on CL and I have two trades for BE+1 to show for it. I've simplified my entry decisions as much as I think I'm gonna get them for now. They are clear and easy to see. I use confirmation, so sue me....its not the confirmation that hurts, its the stop.....yes if I didn't use confirmation, I might be able to go to BE and not get hit, but I KNOW this is gonna happen, its part of the system, that break out pull back that seems to happens 95% of the time. And yet, I cannot seem to stop violating the most basic thing....don't move the stop. I stopped losing by going BE aggressively....but I was also searching around for the holy grail, so going BE often times saved me from my own ignorance.....and I grew to love the BE.....knowing it was protecting me while I learned and solidified my ideas.....but now that I have, its a noose around my neck. Its literally killing me. Its cost me tens of thousands of dollars this year alone in missed winners.....dare I say it, maybe even 100K in profit has been missed because of this issue. I used to say things like "no one changes until the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of change." Now I'm not so sure. The pain of staying the same is extreme and yet I don't change. Now the question is WHY? Another issue is this, once price has moved away from the entry zones, I HATE chasing but often times, a chase can work, the profits are reduced of course but the premise of the trade remains valid.....risk can increase but if you wait for a pull back, that to can be reduced....but for some reason, I feel like once the initial entry is gone, just sit it out. Who knows when and where it will reverse.....maybe the move is over. I'm at McDonalds writing this and CNBC is on the TV, they are talking about "Easy Money Trades". If only they knew!. Today was easy money all over the place and I have none..... Something MUST change and it MUST change soon. I'm growing to hate this in a way I didn't think possible. I told my wife today, days like this make me wonder if I can be a great trader. I know I can be a good trader but being a great trader requires that I change this behavior and change it permanently. I could be a good trader just scalping 10-20 ticks a day. Add size as the account grows....I have the patience and the discipline to do that. I'd be up around 30 ticks today......But I want to be a great trader.....and that requires behavior modification. Honestly, I'm at a loss. I have the weekend to think about it....and maybe the rest of the year....I don't know if I should trade any longer until I figure out what's causing this. Actually I will finish the combine, I have two more days left. Hopefully I will roll it over. All I need to do is have one tick winners with a single lot both days and I'm good....then maybe I sit out the rest of the year.....who knows. @tigertrader says everyone gets what they want from the markets. That sounds like bullshit to me on the surface and yet I wonder if I'm not wrong about that. And if I'm wrong, what does that say about me as a person both emotionally and mentally? Do I subconsciously WANT to not be a winner? That sounds irrational at best and laughably stupid at worst....and yet????? If so, my family is in serious trouble..... Ok, I accept I am the problem. I accept there is something I am not aware of limiting my prospects of being a great trader. Worse, while I'm aware that I'm not aware of what's missing, I've no real idea of what that variable is....and I don't know how to find it and fix it. At the same time, I have a certain feeling hovering around the periphery of my consciousnesses that purports to be the answer...something that sounds vaguely like the word surrender. Something I've not been willing to do.....is it possible to win the war by not fighting at all? Maybe, fighting has not produced desirable results. And in case anyone is wondering, I made $80 today in the combine. Don't laugh and don't judge. I've done enough of that for all of us.

Big Mike 

Brian, there are many axioms in the market, but like most things they work or are true only about half the time. We all struggle with similar things, the difference is the longer you are in the business the quicker you catch yourself making a mistake and then correct it. You are looking for absolutes but won't find them. Stops are like everything else in trading. They can work, they can hurt, they are not black/white good or bad. Bottom line is you need a direction for the market you believe in, preferably macro, then be as fluid as possible and allow your trades to pay you. I wonder how you would do if you traded USO as the ETF and you traded it with the rule of no more than one execution a day, either a buy or sell but not both. Forcing a more macro view and more time to get paid. Sent from my phone

the point @Big Mike is trying to make is you have to trade the market, which is something you have never been willing to do. what you have done instead, is try to develop some kind of quasi-systematic trading approach whose top priority is to delineate and reduce risk and not optimize profitability. you spend more time analyzing your personal trading statistics than the market itself; because visible historical results, provides you with the perception of reliable expectations regarding trade frequency, win rate, profit expectancy, and drawdowns. while the apparent benefit may be a feeling of comfort and control, all it really provides is a set of unrealistic expectations and an improper area of focus.

at the very heart of being a trader is attitude. it is about being confident in oneself and one’s decisions; and confident, yet honest about one’s methodology. clearly, there is no right or wrong style for trading the markets — it is a highly personal decision and one that should be tailored for each individual’s personality, trading experience and objectives. nevertheless, it still has to be profitable and scalable. you obviously don't have confidence in your decisions, and are over-confident in your methodology. i think you know damn well that your strategy isn't all that it's cracked up to be. you're confusing some random streaks of winning trades as an affirmation of your approach, and are allowing yourself to be misled into thinking that your method is robust. a trading system that doesn't provide you with the information and confidence to stay in trades and add is anything but robust.

you are going to make some emotion driven mistakes along the way, but if you focus on how to trade the market, you'll know when trades are good, and you won't want to get out of them until they're not good anymore.

tigertrader 

the point @Big Mike is trying to make is you have to trade the market, which is something you have never been willing to do. what you have done instead, is try to develop some kind of quasi-systematic trading approach whose top priority is to delineate and reduce risk and not optimize profitability. you spend more time analyzing your personal trading statistics than the market itself; because visible historical results, provides you with the perception of reliable expectations regarding trade frequency, win rate, profit expectancy, and drawdowns. while the apparent benefit may be a feeling of comfort and control, all it really provides is a set of unrealistic expectations and an improper area of focus. at the very heart of being a trader is attitude. it is about being confident in oneself and one’s decisions; and confident, yet honest about one’s methodology. clearly, there is no right or wrong style for trading the markets — it is a highly personal decision and one that should be tailored for each individual’s personality, trading experience and objectives. nevertheless, it still has to be profitable and scalable. you obviously don't have confidence in your decisions, and are over-confident in your methodology. i think you know damn well that your strategy isn't all that it's cracked up to be. you're confusing some random streaks of winning trades as an affirmation of your approach, and are allowing yourself to be misled into thinking that your method is robust. a trading system that doesn't provide you with the information and confidence to stay in trades and add is anything but robust. you are going to make some emotion driven mistakes along the way, but if you focus on how to trade the market, you'll know when trades are good, and you won't want to get out of them until they're not good anymore.

At least there's one thing thing right about this post, its about attitude....about being confident in oneself and in one's decision.....as well as honesty about methodology......and about one's personal shortcomings....

I mentioned Gary in the post not so he would see it and chime in but to be honest about where I'd heard the quote although I've seen that same quote many times in other places....so I'm sure he picked it up somewhere as well. As it turns out, he chose to chime in and I should have seen that coming. I rather thought he'd given up on me and wouldn't bother reading the post.....much less respond....oh well....

Before I leave off on this reply, a quick stat: My method which isn't all that its cracked up to be has been profitable since May of last year...there have been a few tweaks along the way.....simpler decision making for the most part, all the while achieving a win rate of less than 45% overall. In fact, I've had one losing month since then. One.....the point of the post in case anyone missed it, was this...the PnL would have been exponentially greater had I not interfered with said non robust method. Not as a result of some hindsight visual hocus pocus, but because of actual real life trades. Trades that worked without me because I exited prematurely because of pure emotion...and not because I lack confidence or because of a lack of robustness.

This is all I'm going to post about this. I'll post the combine results as promised but that's it.

One last thing, this is a bit hard for me because I'm not all that confrontational with people, especially with people that have taken time to speak to me on the phone...but I've decided to put Gary on the ignore list. I just don't like the tone and spirit of his posts. He's a good guy and I do think he wants to help (I might be wrong about this and he just wants to show off) but for some reason he can't help but be derogatory and negative on a personal level with traders....not just me but most traders he's tried to "help" have all experienced his bombastic approach. A number of them have PM'd me over the last few weeks and months wondering why he hasn't been banned for some of his posts.....and I have no easy answer for them....and since life's to short to have the negative input around you all the time, it's the ignore list at least for now...... another decision I have confidence in....

For all the of the thread readers, thanks for continuing to read and hit the thanks button.....I post almost exclusively in my own threads, although lately I've posted in a few other threads, I am still amazed that anyone reads my stuff much less thinks enough of it to hit the thanks button....

Another snippet from "Gambling Theory and Other Topics" by Mason Malmuth.

"Any competent statistician will tell you that one should first form a hypothesis and then collect data to either (statistically) confirm or reject the hypothesis. The way not to go is to collect data first and then look for patterns or trends to exploit. The reason that collecting data first is flawed is that with a large body of data, pseudo-patterns, which are logically flawed, will appear."

I think what he's saying here is that you could easily find "patterns" that *appear* to correlate with financial market performance within any body of historical data -- regardless of what type of data you examined.

Personally, I always buy (Boeing - BA) when it rains in both Cairo, Egypt and Cleveland, Oh -- on the same day - and there are more than 7 births to people named "Smith" in the greater Little Rock, Ak area.

Peace,
Paige

I like following your journal. Because you're going through some of the same things I am.

One thing I don't get is this. You said you could do 20-30 ticks a day and be a "good" trader.

If you can do that consistently on a daily basis, how is that not being a great trader ?

Is it because you feel like great traders have to pick those 100+ tick moves often ? Trading with a positive expectancy over time and you could just add contracts and be golden

I think you're being too hard on yourself at times.

But one thing I can relate to is the "no management is the best management" approach.

I've seen many trades miss my stop by a tick then go full profit.Or miss my target by a tick, reverse back to almost hit the stop then go back up and hit the target.

Best of luck on the combine

You have a good journal, which is valuable to others because you are honest and you try to grapple with issues that everyone faces at one time or another. There's nothing more that could be asked for in a journal. So that's why people read it and say "Thanks."

I hope that your run-in does not sour you on posting your thoughts here, whenever you happen to feel like it. Lots of people appreciate and understand the struggles you are going through, and also recognize that you are actually very successful at your trading. Obviously, you want to do better, as anyone would. But that does not change the fact that you have a proven track record.

Thanks again for your contributions here.

Bob.

------------------

PS: As to the famous, much-repeated quote, here is the original:

"Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money."

It's by Ed Seykota, quoted in Jack Schwager's Market Wizards. Reference here: Ed Seykota - Wikiquote

I think that people like to repeat that quote (without attribution) because it can mean about whatever they want it to mean (), usually without the part about winning by losing, which may make it too specific. It does make you think, though.... whatever it might mean.

(Seykota was an early pioneer in purely automated, computer-driven trend-following systems. He apparently made a lot of money at it. I don't see how that makes for deep psychological insights, especially about discretionary trading, but perhaps it does.... Ed Seykota - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

cejstrup 

I like following your journal. Because you're going through some of the same things I am. One thing I don't get is this. You said you could do 20-30 ticks a day and be a "good" trader. If you can do that consistently on a daily basis, how is that not being a great trader ? Is it because you feel like great traders have to pick those 100+ tick moves often ? Trading with a positive expectancy over time and you could just add contracts and be golden I think you're being too hard on yourself at times. But one thing I can relate to is the "no management is the best management" approach. I've seen many trades miss my stop by a tick then go full profit.Or miss my target by a tick, reverse back to almost hit the stop then go back up and hit the target. Best of luck on the combine

Its not about the number of ticks, its about execution and sticking to the game plan....and yes, if the plan says 30 ticks then great but if it says 42 or 93 or whatever number, then not sticking to that is failing to execute like a professional. All professionals lose at some point but they usually win because they executed a game plan better than the opponent. That is what this is about. Being the best I can be within the context of my current skill level, account size, risk tolerance, etc.

bobwest 

You have a good journal, which is valuable to others because you are honest and you try to grapple with issues that everyone faces at one time or another. There's nothing more that could be asked for in a journal. So that's why people read it and say "Thanks." I hope that your run-in does not sour you on posting your thoughts here, whenever you happen to feel like it. Lots of people appreciate and understand the struggles you are going through, and also recognize that you are actually very successful at your trading. Obviously, you want to do better, as anyone would. But that does not change the fact that you have a proven track record. Thanks again for your contributions here. Bob. ------------------ PS: As to the famous, much-repeated quote, here is the original: "Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money." It's by Ed Seykota, quoted in Jack Schwager's Market Wizards. Reference here: Ed Seykota - Wikiquote I think that people like to repeat that quote (without attribution) because it can mean about whatever they want it to mean (), usually without the part about winning by losing, which may make it too specific. It does make you think, though.... whatever it might mean. (Seykota was an early pioneer in purely automated, computer-driven trend-following systems. He apparently made a lot of money at it. I don't see how that makes for deep psychological insights, especially about discretionary trading, but perhaps it does.... Ed Seykota - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

I knew someone important actually said it...thanks for finding it and pointing out the subtle difference....its actually a rather large point.

due to Panda's request, I've deleted my post. It's his journal after all. I tried, but sometimes truth doesn't matter, peace does. Best to all.