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I'm not really sure what you are asking here. However, you should know I do not have an account with @mattz I just happen to really like him and I go to him with questions and he's always been straight with me. So as far as platform info about Optimus, I cannot answer those questions.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Sorry for confusion Panda, let me clarfiy better. When you put your data into the spreadsheet from Mattz did your winning % of trades vary from NT or were they the same. I would assume the same. this was my question
Again, I don't have an account with @mattz but to answer your question, my numbers were slightly different due to how Ninja handles ATM strategies vs the broker. But the overall numbers are right on. The spreadsheet does not include commissions. I'm not sure if it has a commissions function or not. I haven't found it yet if it does.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
If I Could Teach You One Thing About Trading Success, This Is It
What if it was all wrong? The common advice you hear about trading, that is. What if it was, plain and simple, wrong? Have you ever really considered that?
You’ve been told that you need to focus on simplicity. And that you have to find a few trusted setups to execute with discipline each time they show up. And that all you need is good psychology and you’ll be profitable. But who tells you all of this? Is it professional traders who are making a living from their trading, or is it people who are trying to sell you trading education? Do you think it might be in their best interest to tell you that it’s simple and straight-forward, even when it isn’t?
Well, I’m not here to bad-mouth those people, but as a professional trader who’s made a living solely from trading, I have my own views about what trading is all about, and what it takes to achieve success. So here is what I’ve found.
Trading is not about clear-cut, straightforward simplicity. Trading is about being okay with ambiguity. It’s about tolerating confusion. It’s about sitting with discomfort and being at peace with it. It’s about not having an exact script of when to trade or not to trade, and being okay with that. It’s about exceptions to the rules. It’s about contradiction. It’s about uncertainty.
And yet traders left and right want to make it simple. They want to reduce it to a few simple setups to trade mechanically with discipline. But the market is not simple. The market is all about uncertainty, and complexity, and ambiguity. Simple setups traded mechanically could never capture that, and they can never give you a true lasting edge. So choose a different way.
Choose to learn the art of reading the markets. Learn to synthesize different elements like price action, structure, market internals, and intermarket themes, and pull them together into a contextual view. Only then can you choose to employ “simple” setups to trade with. Because only then will you know which setups to use under which conditions. And this is everything.
And don’t be fooled. Learning this is a very complex process that will take time. It turns out that psychology, while hugely important, is NOT everything. First, you need an edge. And having a consistent edge requires that you dedicate yourself to learning to read the markets and how to execute correctly in context. But it’s very possible. Many have done it before you, and this means that you too can learn it if you dedicate yourself. They had nothing that you don’t have. All they did, was to be relentless.
They didn’t spend their trading days waiting for mindless setups and indicators to line up. No. They spent their days reading the market from minute to minute, hour to hour, figuring out the odds of it doing this or that, adapting dynamically, thinking of trading ideas as the action unfolds.
Now, you’ll ask me if it’s not easier psychologically to just have simple clear setups to wait for. Absolutely. It is. But who said “easy” would make you money? The market rewards what is hard to do. It’s hard to have ambiguity surrounding your market reads. It’s hard being uncertain. It’s hard dealing with competing and sometimes conflicting signs. And yet, this is what it’s all about. You have to avoid needing things to be clear cut. Instead of running from uncertainty, train your mind to be able to better deal with it.
And keep a trading journal. But don’t fill it only with thoughts about your emotions. Let it be filled instead with your notes about market action. You’ll find my notes still in the drawer beside my bed. Over 1000 pages of them. Day after day. Week after week. Making mistakes, wrong interpretations, being clueless about how the market was acting, not knowing how I should trade, not knowing if my views made sense or not. But I continued taking notes and learning. And then, something magical happened. Market feel was born. Now I had the prerequisite to trade those “setups” they’ll tell you about.
So dedicate yourself. Dedicate yourself like you’ve never dedicated yourself before. Trading is a mental sport. You have to approach it like that. Don’t listen to the salesmen. Start building your skills. Start practicing. Make mistakes. Take losses. Be clueless. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s okay; that’s the only way you’ll progress. And trust me, progress you will.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
How to Accelerate Your Trading Learning Curve and Increase Your Largest Profit Days, Part 1
There’s a hidden enemy hurting your trading results. It’s not a lack of discipline, or falling prey to your emotions, or using bad strategies. All those things do hurt, but they’re usually visible and can always be fixed. What I’m talking about is more dangerous.
It’s more dangerous because it’s not readily apparent. And also because it directly affects everything else. So what is this powerful hidden enemy? It’s simply this: being satisfied with your best performances.
Wait, what? Aren’t you supposed to be happy when you do well? Of course you are. And you should reward yourself mentally and emotionally. But don’t linger there. Enjoy the achievement, but don’t be satisfied. Here’s why…
Being satisfied with your best results to date leads to complacency and untapped opportunity. It causes you to not progress rapidly and reach your true potential. And yet the key to surviving your learning curve, and to reaching elite levels of performance if you’re already profitable, is to keep making your ‘best’ better.
If your current best trading day resulted in a net profit of 7 points on the ES emini S&P’s and you’re satisfied with this performance because on most days you barely break even, what kind of motivation are you giving yourself to break through that level and have a 10 or 15 point day? And if you’re not motivated to achieve that, how can you expect to improve?
The Secret to Great Performance
You may be reading up to this point and thinking that you don’t have to always be improving your best performance to improve; you could simply improve by having less bad performances. Very true. But let me ask you a question. What is easier to do, fix your weaknesses or improve on your strengths?
Think about it. What do you find easier to accomplish in life in general, overcoming something that you struggle with or getting even better at something that you’re already good at? I think the answer is pretty obvious. And the answer brings forth an interesting conclusion…
That conclusion is that while elite performers (whether they be top athletes or top traders) definitely do constantly work on their weaknesses, they spend just as much time- if not even more- working on their strengths. This keeps making their ‘best’ even better, and those good performances greatly compensate for all the times they don’t do well.
Let’s take an example. Suppose you’re good at trading intraday trends. Your strengths are patience and a lack of fear of regret. You’ve always had these character traits and they translate into giving you the great ability to hold your winners longer than most people since you’re able to wait and are not always worried about regretting losing the profits. You also have the technical strength of detecting trends early and reading them well. On the other hand, you often over-trade range-bound days because you find all the fake breakout moves highly frustrating, and they bring out the anger in you, which are your natural weaknesses. You also don’t have a good eye for reading choppy days well.
Like most traders, you’re constantly working on those weaknesses. Always trying to control your frustration and anger so that you don’t over-trade and take losses. Always trying to improve your ability to detect and read range days. Now this is all well and good, and you should definitely be working on these weaknesses. But what about your strengths?
Well, if you’re like most traders, you’re not even focusing on your strengths. You’ve taken them for granted and are satisfied with the gains they bring you. But let me pose a question to you. What if you improved your ability to hold trending moves even longer and also became better at detecting them earlier? If in the average month you made 30 points from all the days with trending moves and lost 30 points from all the range-bound days- making you a break-even trader- improving your performance on the trending moves by only 20% puts you 6 points in the green, and suddenly makes you a profitable trader!
Of course improving on the range-bound days by 6 points would also have the same effect, but the point is that it’s much harder to improve that weakness of yours than it is to improve a strength! All things are already aligned in your favor when working on strengths, and this makes a given % improvement easier to achieve. And that makes all the difference.
What the Great Performers Do Differently
The great performers in any discipline naturally understand what I’ve explained above. They definitely always work to eliminate their weaknesses, but they focus even more on accentuating their strengths. They take the more efficient route to great performance.
If a boxer has a great natural right hook, he may work diligently on his weaknesses, but he’ll work even harder on perfecting that right hook. Because he knows that if it’s great, it can win him fights. And he knows that he can make it greater than he can make his other punches, and he can also achieve this feat faster. And if a tennis player has a good forehand, she’ll work a lot on all of her other shots, but she’ll become better overall if she makes that good forehand truly world-class. Because having a bunch of average shots makes her average, but having a killer forehand can win her games, sets, and matches.
So given all of this, here’s what I want you to do right now. Take an inventory of yourself and your trading results. What are your strengths? What key character traits contribute to your best performances? Do you have certain types of market environments that you make more money with? Note all of this down.
In Part 2 of this series, I’ll share with you the strategy I’ve used to improve my trading strengths, and how it leads to faster overall learning (which also helps improve the weaknesses), and to increases in overall profitability.
In the meantime, let me know what you thought of this post! Did it open up your eyes to a new way of looking at things? Or do you disagree with its conclusions? Let’s get a nice dialogue started for the benefit of all.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
How to Accelerate Your Trading Learning Curve and Increase Your Largest Profit Days, Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, I talked about a surprising thing that the top performers in any field do differently than the rest. In this part I’ll be sharing the strategy that builds on this knowledge, and which has helped me accelerate my own learning curve and increase my largest profit days.
By the end of this post you should have a practical method for speeding up your learning, while improving your overall results by becoming better at what you do best. If you’re a developing trader, this could be what pushes you to profitability. If you’re already a consistently profitable trader, this can help take you to elite performance.
The Method
Simple principles can often prove very powerful when put to use. I think you’ll find this method to be simple, and its effects to be highly beneficial.
In Part 1 I told you to do an inventory of your strengths. Particularly, which types of market environments and set-ups do you have the best results with? And which character traits / abilities contribute to your out-performance in these instances? Once you have those, here’s what you simply do:
Each time you reach a new ‘best day’ or ‘best trade’, instantly set a new goal to beat that mark.
You mean that’s it? No complicated strategies? Yes, that’s it. But don’t be fooled; this simple method will start a chain reaction of inevitable consequences that are about to take your game to another level.
The Benefits
To understand why this method is so powerful, let’s think about what happens when you instantly and perpetually set new goals to beat your best performances.
When you want to always better your best, you have to figure out how to improve your skills. So when you have these constant goals, it acts like fuel to push you far beyond what you’d ever normally do. Now you’re no longer satisfied with your good performances. Instead you’re instantly trying to figure out what you’ll need to learn to beat them. And since this is your goal, you won’t believe how much more you’ll push to learn.
Instead of stopping and resting when the market closes, now you stay at your desk and review the day and the trades. After all, you have to beat your new best mark next time around. What could you have done better? What subtle market behavior did you miss? How could you catch it next time? What mistakes did you make? How could you avoid them next time? What things did you do right? How can you do them even more right next time? Put more size on at the right time? Enter earlier? Don’t scale out? Add another trade at certain point? The possibilities for improvement are endless. Both in terms of learning to read the market better, and learning to execute on your insights better.
But something else happens when you use this method instead of being satisfied with your best performances: you start pressing it more when you recognize your ideal trading conditions. In fact, you become better at recognizing those ideal conditions to begin with. Since you’re constantly studying them, you become adept at detecting when they’re likely to occur. And since you want to beat your best, you don’t stop trading when you’re up a nice profit for fear of losing it. No. Now you’re on a mission. Fear of regret gets thrown aside as the bigger regret becomes not beating your best when you had the chance. And given that one of the biggest hidden weaknesses traders have is quitting while they’re ahead for fear of giving back the profits (even though this is often the best time to press it) , you simultaneously remove this weakness.
That’s the power of this simple method. It sets a whole virtuous chain of events in action. And knowing that you have a ‘best mark’ to beat, your focus also increases and becomes laser-like. In the end, and somewhat ironically, you not only end up improving your strengths, but in the process you improve your weaknesses too, and get better on the whole.
Action Plan
So now that I’ve shared with you this powerful strategy, it’s time to go put it to use. From Part 1 you pinpointed your specific strengths. You know when you’re at your best. Now each time you hit a new best performance level (whether on a specific type of trade, day, or period of favorable market conditions), enjoy and reward yourself but instantly set a goal to beat the new mark. You may not achieve it for a while, but the benefits that are brought about from striving to do so are what matter.
If you constantly follow this plan of action, you should find your learning curve accelerating, and your largest profit trades and days increasing, as you capitalize more on your strengths and improve overall.
What methods do you use that have helped you accelerate your learning and improve your performance? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
