Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Desperate call for help, I CANT execute my discretionary trading plan no matter what
Once you have entered on your tiny trading timeframe (5 min or 1 min) just switch to the daily/weekly TF and hide your trading TF to manage your trade until your target is hit. This way you won't feel the urge to close your trade because you are seeing a small reversal bar forming on your trading TF.
Simple but effective. The daily/weekly TF will present a new perspective and this is what you need, i.e., a change of paradigm. Give it a try.
best to think of this in simple terms, if you cant follow your rules, you are trading too big.
your ability to sit in a trade is inversely correlated with your perceived level of risk.
Perception of risk is something that comes from the amygdala a part of your brain that has evolved to prevent you from getting eaten by a lion. You cant talk your way into a different risk appetite if subconsciously you are not ok with it.
you can change this with consistent exposure and incromental scaling. The more you see your system work, the more you will trust it and the less you will feel the need to break rules.
I took those, half of them I cut short. Half I could hold to target this time. Doing the faster chart seems to be helping. This are real time, I saw them live. Hindsight has its place, but at this point in the game I prefer only marking things which I saw live and my guts told me they were signals.
This is the M5 chart with the setups
I didnt trade the M5 until the later arrow today but the m1 chart. I had the m5 up all day, as I used it for context too.
This is the M1. This is all I do.
I judge many things as to why a signal bar is a signal bar
I dont have screenshots before the fact for all trades taken, I posted a couple
This was my morning chart, SPX.
Before:
After:
Thats 8:47 AM eastern
Same thing yesterday:
I know how to read the chart. I dont know how to trade. I see the things daily. It's not luck. You can imagine why I am desperate, I see, I see, yet I can't profit off it.
Thats the difference between knowing the path and walking it and the only way to bridge that difference is to start walking one step at a time like @tigertrader said. Have enough money in your account to last at least a few losing months. Anticipate the losses, they will happen because you wont follow your plan. Make it part of your plan, whatever works for you. Dont get frustrated when you are unable to follow through. Dont change the plan after a string of losses. Realize that its a process that you have to go through and in time you will get over it.
If it helps, you want to be able to lift 200lbs, 10 times a day, every single day but your muscles are not that strong. What do you do? You start with 20lbs and gradually increase the weight as your muscles strengthen. Your brain is also a muscle. It cannot handle the risk that you are taking. So, as others have said, trade micros to lower the risk and then gradually add size when you start winning consistently. Dont rush this process but it is absolutely important to take the risk, however little it is.
Take any profession - professional athlete, surgeon, carpenter, handyman etc. Getting good at anything requires time and persistence.
The greatest, most valuable and differentiating ability of a trader is the ability to take risk and handle his emotions during the process. And this is the most difficult ability to develop. No one takes up trading and immediately starts making money.
You're scared and emotional when trading, and are using this thread as emotional support and crutch. You will go nowhere whining on an online forum. Trading is something you plan ahead of time and execute without overthinking when live.
When I first started trading on the floor, I was somewhat like you, but not quite. I was very risk adverse, because it was in my DNA. My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and were very hard working, and by necessity, they were very conservative with their money. Taking risk did not come naturally to me. As a market maker on the floor, this was not necessarily prohibitive to one’s profitability, but it was most certainly inhibitive.
I would take pride in the fact that I could go months without a losing day, never experiencing a losing week, or a losing month. And, while I was making a very comfortable low 6 figure income, there were others making mid six figures and seven figure incomes. I was never jealous or envious of them, because they deserved to reap the rewards of taking the extra risk.
Nevertheless, I knew I was capable of more! And, I knew for a fact that some of the guys who were making big money were not smarter than me; but instead had more balls than me. So, what was the catalyst for change? What was the epiphany I experienced that enabled me to take my foot off the bag? It’s not as complicated as you might think! I had what is euphemistically called an idiosyncratic loss. And, I sulked and got depressed, but then I still woke the next morning, and my wife and kids still loved me, and lo and behold it wasn’t the end of the world! I had broken the ice, but I didn’t fall through and drown.
That being said, you don’t want to normalize losing to the point where you are totally immune to it. But, you should be able to accept losing as a necessary prerequisite to winning.
