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You can't force your will, your wishes, your hopes your dreams on the market. It does what it does with no regard to us.
It gives, it takes, it teaches. It is violent by nature.
I smile when I hear traders say or see posts in the chat saying market is about to go a particular direction. Reality is no one really knows where it goes next. Sure stats and probabilities can tell us a few things. But no one can say whether the next 20, 30, 100 tics etc will be up or down. I don't care what the price action or an indicator says. They only clue us to the possibility but guarantee nothing. My signals are more often right than wrong and through good money management I profit but once I enter a trade--What happens next I have no clue. Accepting that will help anyone reading this be a better trader.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
The unknowable bracketed by probabilities bending to the will of my indicator......no wonder most traders lose money and why even good ones have head aches trying to figure it out.....
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Contrary to what popular belief may suggest about the struggling trader.... I think that first part of your statement I've quoted is known to most people that have at least attempted to trade for any amount of time. I think the problem that hinders most people from making money is the inability to pick correct direction and duration.
By that I mean be long a net number of contracts as price moves up...... and similarly be short a net number of contracts as price moves down. It seems we can go on about psychology, or money management or strategy...... but at the end of the day, extracting money from the market means at some point, you have to be able to be long if price is rising, and short if price is falling.
There can be many combinations of short/long/flat..... but bottom line is that at the end of the day to make money on any long positions, we would have had to have been net-long as price rose for some duration. And vice versa to make money on a short position.
I quoted the second statement as I am curious what you mean by 'money management?' I've seen it used in many contexts, often glazed over, so I'm wondering what your personal meaning of it is?
Well for this discussion, I'm assuming some form of directional trading, which appears to be what MOST people interested in trading, at least on the forums or what gets discussed..... so some type of future, stock... with the purpose of selling out a long position at a higher price than initiated, or buying out a short at a lower price. So for this discussion I'm ignoring spreads, calendars etc.......
Since you mentioned it as well @Lornz, I'll ask you too, what is YOUR meaning of 'money-management?'
Aside from order flow trading, I have never been able to predict the future price of an instrument by simply looking at its past prices alone. I need to incorporate multiple streams of data to make sense of anything.
I hate a lot of expressions that can easily be misinterpreted; money management is one of them. However, I was too lazy to write what you're forcing me to do now:
Money management simply means position sizing and asset/strategy allocation to me.
I think most people speak of money management when they actually mean trade management. The latter, I think, is an integral part of the system itself, but the former is more about managing one's account relative to the system. I might blow up due to poor position sizing, but that doesn't mean that the system doesn't produce alpha in the long run.
Sorry just now responding to this I have been out of town. What I specifically meant by "money management" is how I scale contracts.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
