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It's amazing to see someone which such determination. I give you my tips:
1. The secret to trading is there's no secret.
The path which real trader walk is full of obstacle, blood and sweat. However, at the end of the path, there are many gems waiting for you.
2. Many people say learn to control your emotion first, but I say learn knowledge first and master your emotion later. It just, you need to make sure that journey doesn't go forever.
My experience with beginner trader suggest that they always feel not knowledgable. Hence, they go into "holy grail journey". While it's true many people are advised to get out from "holy grail journey" ASAP, I would suggest, holy grail journey is prerequisite to build up your knowledge. This knowledge is prerequisite to create your trading plan after all.
3. Don't overdo it.
Just like "Rome is not built in one day". If you want to go place in far away, you can't always run, because you'll get exhausted easily. Same thing happens with trading. Most important thing is just enjoy the process of learning how to trade. If you hate trading, you won't go far in that process, because it's a long journey.
4. Create your plan and follow it.
Trading plan is not only about planning how to trade. But it's also contains how you plan to improve your trading. It give you a road before you do it. The advantage is of course, in case you got lose somewhere, you can always look back at your plan to see where you are and what's the next step rather than screaming and cursing because you got lost. Having plan is worthed, mark my words.
5. Talk to traders.
This forum has a good community. Many traders help each others. Although, some people are not really generous, but many of people here are generous. There's no rule to not ask for anyone help. However, make sure to keep your mind open to new ideas and opinions.
I've seen this in other contexts, for sports, and most recently in a Dale Carnegie course on managing people, but never in a trading context. It's a great lesson. Unconscious Incompetence in tennis is one thing, but in trading it's deadly. Ignorance is definitely not bliss.
Very very few of us are naturals at this, so putting in serious time will move us down the path we need to follow. This is not good or bad, it's just how it is.
At this point this is more of a diary than a trading journal. I've made a few sim trades, but they have all been somewhat pointless; i.e., I have not employed any rules or strategies. The value has been in setting stops and targets, and learning the mechanics.
This is not to say that I have been inert. To the contrary, I've reached an important point in my brief trading journey: when I started I had to force myself to study, but now I really enjoy it and look forward to reading and learning and looking every day. I talk with people at work about it.
Concretely, I finished reading The Complete Guide to Day Trading, by Markus Heitkoetter. It covered a lot of ground, and answered some questions, but boy oh boy do I have a ways to go. Also read Stikky Stock Charts, which you can read in an hour and is worth about that amount of time commitment. Started reading Trade Chart Patterns Like the Pros by Suri Duddella. I'm only a few chapters in, but I'm finding it is not as prescriptive on entry and exit as I had hoped. Maybe I just don't get it yet. I bought and have high hopes for Technical Analysis by Kirkpatrick and Dahlquist. (Has anyone read this book?) It's long at 700 pages and is like a text book, but I'm hoping that thorough descriptions and discussions about indicators, cycles, moving averages, etc will give me a better chance to choose the system and rules that I understand. I'm trying to understand why I choose and use particular indicators before I decide they are right for me. I bought and have just started to read Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques by Steve Nison. So far I like and understand the discussion.
Also viewed Big Mike's video on How to Create an Advanced NinjaTrader Strategy. Needless to say I didn't follow all the programming steps, but I clearly understand what the tutorial was about and know that with time I can use this same approach if I decide it's right for me.
I downloaded NinjaTrader, but didn't receive the registration key, so that's a project for tomorrow.
For my records, I put in 3 hours Tuesday, 5 hours Wednesday, and 5 hours Thursday.
I'm having trouble setting short term specific goals, as I find I still don't know enough to write down a strategy and rules. That's not quite true. I could copy someone else's strategy and rules, but I won't even do that until I feel I can understand the concept, assumptions and dynamics of a system. So, I'll keep plugging.
It's told as more of a story, how each trader made money. It lets you appreciate how successful traders think, what was important about their method or about how they traded, their confidence or personality, etc.
Yes I started my own advice thread on the forum while his book was still fresh in my mind, I was writing a lot of passages that were inspired by ideas from Dr. Brett. His books really speak to me and gave me a lot of ideas on how to overcome the challenges in my own trading.
I was practicing on Oanda FXGame tonight. My goal was modest: execute market orders on EUR/USD, with stop loss, using Bollinger Bands, Candlestick charting and 30 second time frame.
My simple rule was that if the close was above a band for three consecutive periods, I would go either short or long, and set the stop loss one tick away from the close. I wasn't worried about gains or losses, I just wanted to see if I could watch the charts and mechanically execute the trades according to the rules.
My stop losses didn't seem to work. I guess I entered them incorrectly. I was disciplined about following my rule, albeit an extremely simple one. Nevertheless, I made a mistake and tried to close out a short by selling more units, thus opening two positions. Once I realized what had happened, I started looking at my P&L, rather than calmly evaluating the chart and adjusting or closing the open positions. And this was with fake money.
It's late and I'm tired, so I learned that I should not try this when I'm not able to concentrate fully.
Second I learned that I need to invest the time to understand fully the mechanics of the platform. I will make mistakes, but I have to do all I can to prevent stupid mistakes, and I need to keep my wits about me when I do make a mistake. I was just clicking away in a panic for about 15 seconds.
