@lancelottrader, I agree with you. I think that some simple stats can be very telling, for example, very large MAE vs. MFE is a warning sign, as is MAE vs. closed profit. And expectancy per trade, max drawdown over a period, etc., are good numbers to know.

But those only tell part of the story, and it's up to the trader or a coach to interpret those numbers and then hypothesize the underlying issues. A day with a string of losers with small MFEs really tells you nothing about the cause of the problem. Maybe there was no problem at all, and pure bad luck took a victim.

So, I think basic stats are good, because they can alert us to risk violations and to impulsive trading (for example, short amount of time between a string of losing trades can be indicative of impulsive trading, and a consistently high MAE even on winning trades means "blow up coming soon") and the like. But beyond this, we still need to understand what we are doing, how well we are planning, how well we are executing, how well we are adapting and changing the plan when called for, how well we are understanding the context of the day and adapting accordingly, and other factors, and stats do not so easily tell us this.

I would venture a guess that most people who have some bad days and have the stats attached to it really don't know how to then approach "fixing" things. An examination of the approach heading into the day (if there even was one), and an analysis of the actual market conditions and how the trader traded those conditions would probably a good place to start. The trader may find that he was generally right in his approach, just too early much of the time, for example, which would tend to indicate a fear of missing out and therefore an approach geared towards the trader's expectations and psychology may be warranted. But if the trader was just dead wrong, and bought the tops and sold the lows, it might indicate a lack of understanding the structure of the day and the context of the market as a whole, and perhaps the approach would be to do some actual market study to see if there were early signs of the type of day it would be, where the market was trading in relation to previous days, and how the trader could have been more market savvy in general. These are just two examples, and stats alone will unfortunately not tell the whole story here.

On a different note, IT7, I'm enjoying your thread and look forward to your continued posts, keep it up!

I could be missing something, actually it would be really surprising if I wasn't missing something very obvious.

What do you guys see? What am I missing? What have I not considered?

Today was a great day as far as having the proper trader mindset goes. Really quite good, but not perfect.

After checking the news today, I got the idea to set a loop timer to be a reminder to bring me back to where my mind should be, and read through important mental beliefs and such that I have written out (all Mark Douglas stuff).

Hey guys, I'm trying to find what the pattern in CL price action has been over the past six trading days from 11:30CST to pit close at 13:30CST..... I could really use a sharp eye to help me see if there is any similarities... I've highlighted the time of day with a rectangle on each day's chart...