Any amount that you are currently ahead -- regardless of how much of this amount is still open -- is 100% yours.

@PandaWarrior, I was wondering if you would be willing to answer these questions. I am copying the questions from a series of interviews from Embrace The Trend:


1) How long have you been trading? I've been interested in the markets since I was a little kid. I quit my first job because they said I was to young to particpate in the 401K plan they had. But as far as trading goes, I started about 3 years ago.



2) What style of trading / investing do you practice (technically driven, fundamental, systematic, a combination etc)? 100% technical. I ignore news during the trading day and rarely look at it after.


3) How do you feel when a trade goes against you? Most of the time, I feel more or less calm. But in the beginning, I sweated bullets.


4) How do you feel when a trade goes for you? Most of the time, I feel more or less calm. But in the beginning, I sweated bullets.


5) How have these feelings changed over your trading career? (Can you recall how you originally used to feel and elaborate on how this has changed over time?) Its only changed by building confidence in what I am doing. The extreme physical reaction to being in live trade was due mostly to me simply guessing about what I was trying to do. I don't think I'll ever completely eliminate the nervousness of trading. I just want to lessen its impact on how I trade.


6) Do you have any practices that you do away from the trading screen to help you mentally and emotionally handle trading? I never look at charts on the weekend. Sunday night I get ready by reviewing a few things. I spend a lot of time reading non trading related stuff. My wife and I are wanders at heart and so if we can't travel, we plan travel or watch travel related films or TV. My faith is also important to me and I rely on it for the more difficult periods of life.


7) Have you always done this? No, I spent 24/7 looking at charts for the first 2.5 years and stressing over why it wasn't as easy as the hype made it sound!


8) If not, how have you learnt to deal with the feelings that come up when trading?


9) Can you describe a time in your trading life which really rammed home the point that so much of trading comes down to psychological factors? I've always known it, but it was rammed home once when I was reviewing my original thread here on futures.io (formerly BMT) and seeing how nice some of the "methods" I came up with or borrowed from others looked. I realized then everything works for somebody. The missing component was mental. This was further driven home when I watched a documentary about professional blackjack players and how they approached the business of gambling.


10) If you could give aspiring traders one piece of advice about emotionally handling the market what would it be? I would suggest that getting to the emotional realization that trading has little to do with mechanics as fast as possible is paramount. There is a gap between the head knowledge that trading is mental and the emotional buyin that is required to focus on it. The only way to accomplish this is trading live money. I recommend trading micro forex to do this and gradually increasing size until you are playing with something approaching the kind of money you trade in futures. This is not the route I took but I didn't know any better either. In hindsight, this makes the most sense. My brother is doing it this way and is experiencing some success. He did trade live money in the futures but to his credit, realized it was to intense for him at that point.

Mike

Matt will be on futures.io (formerly BMT) Monday, and I'm trying to get Michael on early next year

Mike

I had a long bias coming in as all the charts were long. I got my first short signal one the 1M and passed, I had taken several shorts last week that were all BE trades as the HTF were long. Today I simply passed waiting for the longs to show up.

Once the 1M and 3m were short, I kept thinking the 9M would hold at support and presto, the longs would take over and up we would go.

By the time I figured out we were short, I was disappointed I didn't recognize it sooner, I would have been chasing and I just decided to let it go.

Trouble was, on the daily chart I had decided we would go down instead of up in this range. And yet I failed to act on it.

No losers today but no winners either. In fact, no trades at all.

A total and complete screw up today.

I had a long bias coming in as all the charts were long. I got my first short signal one the 1M and passed, I had taken several shorts last week that were all BE trades as the HTF were long. Today I simply passed waiting for the longs to show up.

Once the 1M and 3m were short, I kept thinking the 9M would hold at support and presto, the longs would take over and up we would go.

By the time I figured out we were short, I was disappointed I didn't recognize it sooner, I would have been chasing and I just decided to let it go.

Trouble was, on the daily chart I had decided we would go down instead of up in this range. And yet I failed to act on it.

No losers today but no winners either. In fact, no trades at all.

A total and complete screw up today.