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Appreciate your time
I look forward to reading your comments
Will summarize my trading journey so far and outline what I am planning to do
Little background about me to set the scene up
My father was a government bureaucrat and mom was an academic who taught me from an early age that money was bad and dirty. Spent my middle school high school first with x286 and later x386 PC and ended my last job Consulting with AS400 IBM iSerious Machine. . So I was financially illiterate until I started my trading journey 3 years ago.
After graduating college and landing my job I thought alls I had to do was keep up with the latest technology and climb the corporate ladder , So I did.
However, I was not making nearly as much money as I wanted. I remember vividly having a one-on-one meeting with one of the executives telling him how bored I was and needed a better position with more money…. Suddenly I asked him, you must be making 3 times more than I , right? To which he laughed hard and said no. I said surely so and so VP makes a half a mil, right? He laughed even harder and said no. I was shocked and felt bamboozled . On the other hand , my best friends who barely graduated highschool and skipped college all together were making millions!!! One started to flip cars with $3000 and after 15 years with the help of the auction credit line he was netting over 2 mil a year!!! Another one who started a junk yard with his uncle and was nettining 5 mil a year only after 8 years. I was devastated.
Fast forward a few weeks. Told my boss to jump into the lake. I quit my job as a Senior A.I. Consultant at IBM to become a millionaire. Thankfully there was youtube where I could learn everything even at x2 speed!!! Day trading here I come.
I am confident you know the rest of the story … After 3 year of spending countless hours looking at charts . strategies, youtube vidoes, articles I was defeated.
I didn't give up. Somebody was making the “smart”money; why couldn't it be me? Took me 3 months to lick my wounds and start a new approach. Here I am now fired up and Ready to GO.
My Trading journey
Unconscious incompetence( You don't know what you don't know) 6-8 months
Watching Youtube videos and thinking “ HUH, I got it!”===> there goes 2 grand
More videos, “ I know what I did wrong”, that was easy ===> another 3 grand
Discretionary Price Action Trading 16 months
I thought I had hit the gold pot
There goes 16 months and $$$$ in the broker’s pocket
Eventually I got good at naked chart price action it yet it was not sustainable for me
My best week was 72% win rate 1.35 R:R
However that was after living like a monk for 7 weeks and only trading MNQ
One small mistake and it was all gone
Conscious Incompetence 6 months
Technical Analysis , Price action, Risk Management , Strategy Development , Metrics of evaluation
Here I am, how can I become profitable the most efficient and effective way?
I would love for you profitable trader to evaluate my agenda going forward
Building an ANTIFRAGILE system
Learning Python
Code the strategies that I have learned so far ( Pullback trading, Momentum Trading, Value Investing Strategy)
Code a Stock Scanner
Code Risk Manager module
SemiAuto Autotrader executor Backtesting for 6 month
Paper trading for another 6 months
Win a trading challenge and use 3rd party money and leverage to make MONEY!!!!
Please share your thoughts and comments and if and how I can reach profitability in a more efficient and effective way
Much Love and LIGHT TO YOU ALL
Mental Stat :
Autistic , love to learn , quick learner. Sometimes it is different for me to start a task but when I start I will see that it is completed
Education :
BS Software Engineering
BS Logistics and Supply Chain Management
MBA Marketing
Hi @DigitalStandard, I will not tell you what you should do to become successful, because I do not know. I realize this may not be what you are looking to hear....
You should know that everybody who has found a way that works for them has found their own path. Sometimes it is like someone else's, but it is never the same, and it is always found by themselves, working essentially by themselves. We can and hopefully do learn from others, and should never stop doing so. But what you end up with, whether successful or not, is always yours alone. This is not necessarily good news, but it does hold up.
Another thing that holds up is that while many make the attempt, most do not make it. This is just a fact of trading life. It is important to realize that if the task were easy, everyone would be rich, and most are not. Trading -- learning trading, actually -- seems to be an easy thing, but it is not. And it is a much more individualized thing than just about everything else.
This is only in part because you have to find the "right system." It is mainly because you have to encounter and deal with your own internal issues that will make you act against yourself. You may know them already (I hope so). They include impulsiveness, greed, fear, over-optimism, over-pessimism, gambling fever, too little caution, too much caution... well the list can go on, but basically it's about a mismatch between the need for an objective assessment of opportunity and the natural human desire to make a buck.
In other words, the motives that bring a person to trading also operate against them. It is like this probably for everybody. Without knowing your details, I imagine this fits your troubles in trading to at least some degree also.
I try to read most of the posts that are made here every day. I can tell you that this applies to a large number of people, and has for a long time.
So what to do?
Well, there is no "perfect system," but you need something. I have no idea if your idea of coding an automated system and backtesting it will be your answer. There are many who are trying to do this. But you do need something. There are traders here who are consistently profitable just doing totally discretionary trading based on "price action" (people have many ideas about what "price action" means, which is part of my point.) But most aren't profitable. But also, there are traders who are partially or totally automated and who are consistently profitable... but most aren't profitable doing this, either.
So you do need something, call it a system or a method or an approach or whatever. Perhaps your ideas about your system will yield something that you can use, and you do need "something." But it is not all you need.
You also need to execute with complete detachment and objectivity. You need to not care how a trade works out, if it is one that you "should" take. The problem is that no one is totally objective about it, and you need to have a lot of confidence in your method, and of course it has to work or you will just go broke. But still, you need this attitude.
Traders think that if they have a completely automated system, this problem will go away for them. This is not what happens in real life. They get worried about results, they see the system is not doing what they expected, they feel they have to adjust (mess with) it. Or they stay in sim and backtest mode forever because they can't pull that trigger. You can't avoid the human aspect of trading, so you need to make the destructive aspects of human trading behavior less a problem, however you do that. Pure automation does not do it. Managing yourself does.
Finally, you have to keep your losses small. Easier to say than to do, and also a matter of your self-control more than a matter of your system, even if it is automated, since you will be the one who has designed it, and will be the one who will be applying it (and putting your money into the trades it takes.)
With all of these things in hand, there is a decent chance for a trader to do well. But it does require some realism and being aware of yourself as you trade. None of this is meant to discourage you, just to let you know something of what other people have found. Things that are probably true for everyone, actually.
I'm not going to try to tell you what your path forward should be, because, as I said, I do not know and cannot know. Maybe some of this will be helpful, though.
Good luck.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Did you ever resolve this? If you subconsciously believe that money is "bad and dirty", you may make "mistakes" to get rid of it. No system in the world will work with that operating in the background.
I've found that I have to work on myself much more than I do the rest of it.
That is precisely why what I am aiming for, to create that "something"
Previously, since I was exclusively executing my trade discretionarily I could not follow my own plan as I would forget say rule 3 , 7 and or 11. I could only have so many rules in my RAM(if you will). Since nothing was automated my brain (specially under pressure) would forget/ignore some of the main rules and either frontrunner or just wait too long or ....
Now I want to create that "something" so as I backtest and Paper Trade. I can stick to what I have learned in the past and also add any new knowledge to that system. Hardcode it!
I also understand what you mean by "Traders think that if they have a completely automated system, this problem will go away for them. This is not what happens in real life" I recognize I hope I can do better since I have been burnt already, but I am sure I am going to make the same mistake multiple times before I can overcome this challenge as well
I haven't replied before now because I don't have a good answer! It may be one of the things still holding me back. I try to be aware of what my thoughts are as I do things, and that has helped. Sometimes when I get to where I hesitate to enter a trade (in demo mode!) I'll "force the issue" by doing it anyway, just to see what my emotional response will be. Making mistakes would be the opposite of that, I'd think. You are already doing things, you need to stop doing them. Lots of detailed notes and consistent reviews may bring it to light.
First you have to drop the notion that money is evil. This, I found, is sour grapes in most cases. They can't have it, so they talk themselves into: "Oh, I didn't want that evil stuff anyway!"
With enough money, you can do almost anything humanly possible. You can destroy, but you can also build. You can kill, but you can also pay for the best medical care in the world. You can chop down forests and destroy so many lives, but you can also use that money to plant trees. You can be greedy and keep it all, or you can donate every penny you have to charity.
The choices are yours. Money does not change people any more than suddenly being released from prison or slavery changes people.
You have to turn yourself into the kind of person you're happy, genuinely happy, to see in the mirror every morning. You have to believe that you deserve good things in life. You have to believe, in some sense, that it is evil for good people to not have money.
Our minds all play tricks on us.
It's not the root of all evil. It's the most versatile tool we modern humans have.
Reward yourself for following your rules. A trade that loses money is not a bad trade if you followed your rules. It's a good trade with a bad outcome.
Find a trading buddy or start a real time journal. Commit to following your rules. Have a consequence to not following your rules. (every time you break a rule you have to donate $100 to your favourite charity or your buddy gets to punch you in the nose, whatever it takes so that the rules are more important than the money) Even posting in a journal where others can see that you broke your rules will help.
"The days when I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, I have really good days" RW Hubbard
Only thing I have to offer is my experience. I've been trying to "master" trading (aka my own mind as it relates to my trading errors) part time for 8-9 years. I have many commitments and only a few hours a day usually for trading but it lives in my mind constantly. Sometimes I feel like "man what's the point...if you don't have it now it ain't gonna happen"...but then I listen or read about others that took years to go from losing to break even and finally to profitability. The old adage of 10,000 hours comes to mind.
Some of you comments..."unconscious competence" and an "antifragile" system show that you've gained some of the valuable knowledge that is out there. Now you just need perseverance, humility (so you don't lose all your money while learning) and focus on a system that works. I've heard of people (some on this forum) who have been the type that just "get it" and trading isn't that hard for them...I believe it's a mental "type" that some people naturally have. For the rest of us...we need to "unlearn" years of habits and mindsets that work out in the world but not here. That's what the 10,000 hours is for.
The last ingredient that has kept me here is that I love the challenge and the markets...and I've learned more about myself in trying to master it than any other means.
Best of luck,
Craig
Until you make the Unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it Fate...
