zdo

Kurt thanks for a realistic article. A few comments for beginners… Most of the meme ‘confidences’ we see discussed are false ‘confidences’. Example: the ‘confidences’ built when students observe someone else demonstrate skill is self stroking and ultimately useless. Any ‘confidence’ engendered prior to repeated bhvrs and realistic observation of their results is just another cognitive psychological approach that really has limited value, if any… Basically, these fake ‘confidences’ will hardly help at all for one to persevere when a behavior doesn't supply immediate, obvious success... DO NOT “Begin working on your confidence today” ! Confidence is one of those areas a trader is better off letting emerge on its own … instead of attempting to build ‘confidence’ explicitly. That is a losers game… Before the experience of success - which does engender emergent, not contrived, ‘confidence’ – there are many things to focus on besides ‘confidence’. Kurt mentioned ‘who you are’ … one of the things you can focus on / be aware of / explicitly engender BEFORE you have successful experiences under your belt is ‘courage’… courage to start and restart in the complete absence of results and the emergent genuine confidence that will come from real experience… DO NOT "Believe in yourself and have faith in your abilities"… every one of those beliefs you ‘make’ has a (usually completely unacknowledged) pole – which is ready to step in and be as strong operationally as the ‘good’ belief you made up. Courage … to act despite the beliefs / in awareness of the presence of your beliefs - be they empowering or limiting – to act despite the fake “faiths” or lack of them Noobs. drop confidence way down your list. …and if you look closely, you’ll see I haven’t really disagreed with Kurt at all…

Believe it or not…this could be a way to bring back a verisimilar of the real Taylor Trading method. Such ‘virtual’ structures are basis for, acknowledged or not, the same types of emergent, informal, loose collusion blocs taylor noticed and leveraged on wacker way back when…

except for one thing – ‘someone’ never compared trading tournaments to spread betting . ‘someone’ mentioned spread betting, (along with an incomplete list of some other examples from disparate arenas and instruments) as something serious traders quickly learn to avoid… the comparisons are all yours… To each his own … hope you find many gamers to play with…

if it looks like a can of spam, it probably...

...the market is people. Plus… http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/trading-psychology/10549-they-don-t-schedule-championships-trading.html If you need to “challenge people”, why not join in face to face gaming at the tables – poker, etc. If you’re serious about trading, such a ‘tournament’ might be appropriate during certain developmental stages, but most would be advised to avoid them… sorta like most would be advised to avoid spread betting, buying premium, etc. etc. . … that is – if you’re serious about trading…

the monkey search... Ben Paynter ...risk assessment ... risk aceptance / risk aversion... Throw Balloons, Assess Employee Skills | Barry Moltz :winkwink:

heuristics . this thrd is really about heuristics not mindsets or psychology

If only ... If only...

Want to buy some dollars with your gold ? Paper Vs. Physical Gold: Picturing The COMEX/SGE Divide | Zero Hedge please move along, folks … nothing to see here

charles hugh smith-What Every Student in America Should Know About The Federal Reserve

all your platinum are belong to us

Rande, "puzzles" me too... it's everywhere up here... A thread about an individual indicator or 'What's your favorite indicator?' shows up and the "you shouldn't be using indicators" posters show up... The Regular Session has started... zdo

M.A. You are joining those who realize that I am probably the worst communicator ever… but for the occasional soul who does actually benefit from my communications, I wouldn’t even bother... Re: “Even if we use 1/3 of optimal-f,” … that’s correct. The red runs and accomp. drawdowns will still occur. However if you run the tests on most typical systems at circa .33 optimal-f the EC will look SMOOTHER – which is one of the ways of metricking ‘consistency’ we were discussing. It is system dependent. If you bitfiddle and slide testing up and down around that .33 of optimal-f, you will find each system’s smoothest %... never will be all smooth… except for the occasional chance and temporary anomaly with Dinesh example, I was briefly discussing the broader side of the question What is "consistency"?. …and I didn’t say he was a risk averse trader. I meant that in my initial personal contacts with him my impressions belied the actual amount ‘unconsistency’ he could tolerate. And btw, 40% drawdowns do not ‘define’ a professional trader as bad at all. (These days he wouldn't get hired as a manager... but..). It is system dependent. For example, at the returns per instrument level (not portf level), one of the most ‘inconsistent’ methods you could ever apply is true and near true trend trading. Each trader needs to ‘study’ him or herself AND ‘study’ the available systems and then align himself to the systems most compatible to himself… the varying 'need' for ‘consistency’ is an aspect of that …we all would love ‘consistency’ in the ideal… but in actual practice some of us can tolerate more inconsistency than others can. Anecdotally… coming up on 30 years trading and when I look back and remember the times I felt the need and tried to figure out how to be more ‘consistent’ in my trading per se that was typically just a symptom of much deeper issues… just sayin… All the best, zdo

All is well here… you are free to move about the matrix again ... and the children are safer than ever... ( VIDEO: Police shoot dog defending owner as cops arrested him ? for filming them - BlackListedNews.com )

you don't know me, but you think I think I can quantify human "emotions"... ?? that quite a jump... on all sorts of levels... will PM you when you're 'right' ... jk

Omg… you did it again! ...these little truisms and traps you're spurtin are unintentionally misleading! Grey must be ‘quantified’ in wetware (where there’s quite high proficiency in humanoids -maybe too high, especially for traders) or in code (where the ‘proficiency’ is significantly more challenging) They call it ‘fuzzy logic’... and we 'do it' -quantify the grey - all the time Hope that ultimately you’re not taking my reactions personally... they are for other readers

Gekko, you're still here?... thought you were leaving... Yet you have a Golden C … and you have a Golden C, yet you spew treat us like sht More 'you spot it - you got it' That's what I always tell myself...

" The prudent keep their knowledge to themselves, but a fool's heart blurts ...." Proverbs 12:23 ... in most cases herein, it's a matter of not 'sowing seed on rocky ground' (more bible - while it's still legal...) ie not wasting your time writing out quality explanations that still won't be understood... "True Genius Resides in Simplicity"

When I said "Steady, ‘consistent’ returns across a long sample often means the trader is running mm (too) far below the optimum…" I was talking about sizing mostly... not personal performance... MM math has one sizing schema that approximates optimum-f... a 'sweet spot' sizing for the expectancy (has to be +) of a particular system. Setting aside the practical part that optimal-f is still to high and just focusing on the 'theoretical' - what I was saying is if you run at about a third of optimal - f (for most 'typical' systems) you will produce a little bit more of the smooth part of 'consistency' (as defined) (... and a lower slope too... btw.) ... very generally speaking though... It's all really system specific. ...and one of the best 'professional' traders I've ever known, Dinesh D., routinely 'outperformed' and routinely had a very jagged eCurve and routinely was in (up to) 40% drawdowns... to talk with him you would project that he was risk averse and seeking consistency... but somehow in real life trading he was able to forego 'consistency'... A properly correlated and dynamically sized 'portfolio of systems' is the penultimate 'consistency' machine... hth

Thanks for sharing. Sad fact is 'ET' is everywhere ... I was protesting the paucity of the OP... True genius does not "reside" in simplicity. All the best, zdo

"Simplicity , in my terms , has nothing to do with loss avoidance or anything like that." Yet we got the following…’in your terms’ no lesson comingling there ? And you're asking us to “Stop trying to complicate a ham sandwich.” and "You have a seller with his offer You have people who are offering to buy at a certain price ( bid) and will not go higher. You have people who do not care what price is they just have to have the thing so they "BUY IT NOW" same as a market order. You have spoofing on ebay and bid retracting just like the financial markets." One man’s “simplicity” is another man’s “noise” and … why are you complicating things with bid and offers? In liquid markets ...

M.A. re "What is 'consistency'?" Historically the favored way for measuring managers is adequate slope and sufficient smoothness of equity curve. :nowgoingofftopik???: I have found that it’s best for me to ‘measure’ consistency not on outcomes, but on the consistency of my own moment to moment and day to day perceptual acuity … (fwiw, that's individualized info…learned through naturally being a little bit more mutable than average, and across many years of often trading multiple systems at once, realizing the long hard way that returns are simply not consistent across time… strive for inner consistency … outer / returns consistency – forgetaboutit ) Steady, ‘consistent’ returns across a long sample often means the trader is running mm (too) far below the optimum… yet (somehow) finding a way to remain ‘exposed’ anyways…

Yum! …chicken. A trader can very easily simplify himself right out of business. (…I sincerely hope not while morphing and weaving ‘simplicity’ into trading psychology lessons about loss avoidance biases, responsibility, etc. in the process…) True Genius Resides in Complex-ifying as much as is needed and Simplifying as much as possible – not in weighting one and discounting the other for everyone by edict. Ie True genius is staying near your own sweet optimal spot ‘btwn’ weird complexity and utter simplicity.

What I’m really finding ‘mmature’ * is the emphasis on OR’s instead of AND’s It takes - ‘Maturity’ AND ‘mindfulness’… AND ‘virtues’ AND … ...Not really a “rebuttal” at all… * one more time – jk ... those :winx: have no meaning to you? If you’re so locked down in ‘responsible self’, ‘judgmental self’ ‘protector/controller’, whatever, etc that you can’t tolerate any levity, then -more than just "like Rande and his posts", you might benefit from giving him a call … yes, even you - compatible "philosophical viewpoint" or not. … and if even you could benefit, then the other(s) this post is really talking to might benefit too… … and btw, something we do agree on, peeps - RH 'stuff' is not for everyone

No way in hel would I ever qualify for a discourse with Steve… I’m just too flippant and silly and… but someone else out there might need to hear this - so… Steve, you’re making some fkn immature assumptions jk To assume that since you (and the small cohort you have experience with) can pull it off by just ‘being mature’ … to assume that since ya’ll are all squared away, that every other individual can get it together by just bringing an "adult perspective" … an ‘aware ego’, and not dealing with and bringing into inclusion any ‘disowned subpersonalities’ / ‘archetypes’ / ‘wotchamaycallits’ is just sheer dum ignernc bubba ----whoops excuse me --- that,sir, is just sheer naivite... ... :severalirreverentsmilyfeces: ...