MightyMouse

BTW, nothing against MP, which has its place in trading. Dalton simply tried to make more of it than he should have and wrote about topics that he really wasn't qualified to write about.

A better trading school is to get a pole, a bucket, and some worms and learn to fish. Try to survive with what you catch. When you fish, if you intend to catch more than a buzz you generally go out with the intentions of catching a particular type of fish. Which means you need the right size hooks, the right bait, you have to go to the right water (fresh water or salt, high or low tide, shallow or deep water, etc), go at night or during the day, etc. To catch a lot of fish, you'll need a lot of bait. If you do not learn how to properly fish, you'll waste a lot of bait. Other fish will prey on your bait and leave your hook bare. Generally it occurs unbeknownst to you; in which case, if the target fish does come buy, you are bait-less and will not catch anything. Your bait relative to your target fish should be inexpensive. You could actually go to the fish market and purchase a few pounds of tuna to use as bait, but what would be the point of fishing for bass with tuna? You may as well eat the tuna. You learn that a good fisherman will more often than not catch more fish than a bad fisherman, but a bad fisherman can certainly get lucky and catch more fish or a bigger fish than a good fisherman (trust me on this). You learn that you cannot easily catch, say, a striped bass with a snapper hook and you won't likely catch a striped bass using a minnow as bait. You'll also learn that if you fail to catch a fish and use a lot of bait, that the type of fish you were trying to catch was simply not there. Should you try to catch a different type of fish, or should you move to a different fishing spot or should you go home for the day? I do not fish that often, but I do not ever recall seeing a fear stricken fisherman who is afraid to cast a line because of the number of times his bait was stolen from him and now spends his time sim fishing until he figures it out. I think you can learn a lot more from the fishing experience than you will with most trading schools. The best way to learn how to fish or trade is to do it along side someone who knows how to do it or simply do it on your own. MM

Not sure where you got the notion that I support VSA.

I bought a monitor which had a shorter base than the other 2 that I had. I used Jim Dalton's book, "Mind Over Markets", to even out the monitors. It is now so useful, I would never sell it. I will keep your Field of vision in mind if I decide to get another monitor that I need to even out. Would you mind telling me how thick it is? I think the book would be appropriately named too.

Read back a bit. I said that the more the better and named a few of the others that impact volume but are not directly seen. All to mean better than using just the futures contract volume. I would be interested in leaning about the traders who trade using VSA and are successful using only the contract volume.

Unconscious competence is a term that is more appropriately applied to something like driving, music, or sports. It really does not have a place in trading since trading progress and excellence is very difficult to measure and it is unclear that it can be measured at all. What a lot of us do is assign our winning trades that were done spontaneously, to some stroke of intuitive brilliance, and our spontaneous mistakes to something else.

Trading is tremendously different from what I expected. 1. Initially, I was fooled by luck and eventually humbled by the same. 2. I was unaware of the capital requirements and how they change with changing market conditions.

if you have no quantifiable data, then why would you think that you might want to harvest it?

When you have a few beers, you'll definite get more intuitive. How many times have you taken a trade based on intuition that worked? How many times have you taken a trade based on intuition that did not work?

I lived on 106th between Broadway and Amsterdam. Good times

1. In wasting your time knowing yourself to improve trading, I am referring mainly to the time spent understanding why you are still upset about your father not playing with you when you were a child. I didn't mean you shouldn't find a style of trading that suits you. In my mind, finding a style of trading means finding a type of trader that you are good at taking money from. 2. Your short comings and worst sides of you are sides that you learned are bad, but in fact don't even exist. I know there is nothing wrong with me. I do not know you, but am quite comfortable saying that there is nothing wrong with you either. Do not think that this means that I think I know everything or that you should now think you know everything. You are supposed to be happy when you succeed, angry when someone takes something from you, and get nervous when a trade goes against you, etc. If these are normal and you do them then there is nothing wrong with you. You need to learn to manage them, and trade while you manage them, but they are completely normal. If you experience fear, then you need to rid yourself of it, but that is a completely different topic. 3. I wish I could say that I know that money is going to be there for me to take when I trade, but I simply do not know. So if not knowing if money is there to take is a mistake, then, yes, I make mistakes. However, taking a trade when I am supposed to take a trade is never a mistake. Losing money on a properly executed trade is never a mistake. I completely accept that I am going to be wrong and I am prepared every single trade to be wrong. My acceptance of it doesn't mean I like it.

I have moved from saying "why did I just do that" or "what was I thinking" to "Fu6k Trading!" "I Love Trading" or I Hate Trading!" The change coincided with an improvement in results which was largely a result of learning how to properly execute. So, the mistakes are about 99% gone and I just deal with the good and bad results of the trade. I hate losing, I always will hate losing, and I want to hate losing. If someone wants to learn to like losing, then be my guest. A bad day of day trading, defined as multiple losses with no chance of recovery, aggravates the shit out of me. But I do know that each and every trade was done properly. I completely accept that there are times when I am looking for something that just is not there and I accept that sometimes I get paid a nice chunk because, well, "shit happens".

Tom, Sounds to me like you spend a little time aligning your "self" with the market. Your "self" should have nothing to do with the market. Spend your time thinking about how to get money from the other "selves" in the market. When I enter a trade, I am always hoping I run into someone with a larger ego who thinks he knows what he is doing when he is winning. Don't take this the wrong way, but its a common mistake to think you can learn something about your "self" from trading. Do not take my statements to mean that I have mastered or tamed my ego. Nothing can be further than the truth. MM

You are right on the money. The flip side to that, though, is that you also limit your potential gain if you limit your risk. You can't leave a position on overnight to catch the whole move if you want to trade with a large leveraged position like you would if you were trying to catch, say, a 30-50 pip move with a 10 pip stop. There is a great likelihood that you can wake up and your account is gone with that type of leverage on and it still will go in the right direction without you in it. I have been short the euro since early March. I am really trying to get "positioned" which I have yet to accomplish, so my position is still small and would hurt only the most sensitive of individuals if it ended up getting stopped out (again). If I do get positioned, then I will add a lot more to the trade, but at that point, when the position is larger, the risk of loss will be nearly zero with the trade. The comparison is this: Are you better off taking the 30-50 scalps for 300-500 usd gain risking 100USD each time, or would you have been better off you initially risking 100 usd on a smaller position and leveraging the gain as it moved in your favor? Scalping the move down, you can, perhaps, make/take money every day if things work out in your favor and you know what you are doing. If you were able to catch the whole move from 1.08ish down to 1.00ish, you can make anywhere from 8k to about 30k if you know what you are doing and things work out in your favor, starting out with the same 100USD potential risk. There is really no right "answer" the above. It's all about style, stamina, temperament, greed, etc.

It's a given that nervous long traders sell on any bad news. Keen short term traders who expect that they can spook weak longs out of the market, try to press the market lower to prey upon the positions of the weak longs. Longer term Buyers, who want to conceal their long interest, use the sell offs as an opportunity to buy shares at relatively cheaper prices and can do so without bidding prices up on themselves when weaker longs are exiting and short term traders are shorting. Long term buyers do not sell when the market moves 1 point, 5 points or 10. Shorts soon realize that they have overshorted and are stuck with a huge position and there are very few sellers who want to sell since the smart shorts have already exited, the weak longs are gone, so they have to begin buying back at higher prices. So, under current conditions, lower china growth will lead to higher market prices soon. Patience confidence and discipline.

I would certainly like to see us press to and then through 1.30 on the euro before the end of the week. I am expecting new decade lows, but it's not something that I would expect to happen very soon. When we get below 1.3, having a short position from above 1.3 will be awesome trade location.

SUIYA, Screen trading is far less stressful, mentally exhausting, etc than many other vocations. It is definitely more stressful than, perhaps, an hourly position as a cashier, though that might be pretty stressful, dependent on the neighborhood the store is in. Lately, I have been actually finding trading to be relaxing. No joke and just my opinion, of course. MM

7 more lines and you'd have a sonnet.

Well, you did say you helped you friend out who was losing and in a very short while he was doing ok because he was able to get help from an experienced trader. That does sound magical to me. I think you did it over the internet too, not in person.

Lots and lots and lots of emotion here over these pages. Emotions come out when someone has something at stake that they are afraid to lose. It reminds me of someone who is stubborn and suck in a losing trade.

IMO scam is very fitting for a lot of the vendors who sell trading goods and services. The fact is that no one would pay me to tell them that they probably won't make money every month like they hope if they day trade using my method and that they probably do not have enough capital to extract enough money from the market to maintain a decent standard of living. Oh and with current market conditions, earning about 10% per year is very good. However, I will attract a lot of people if I say that they can make money every day using my system, that my system will allow them to be their own boss, that they can easily make 100% a year and my method works in all markets and all conditions. Even though I can't guarantee it. The intentions of the first offer is to be brutally honest based on my experience and knowledge of markets. The intentions of the second offer is based on what I know traders want to hear. In the second case I am luring traders into buying a product or service that I will not be able to deliver. Caveat emptor aside, I will classify the second offer as a scam.

I am a testament to how difficult dancing is. If you saw me dance, you would question how or if I was ever able to get laid.

I looked at Don Jones way back in 2008 when I was interested in MP but I did not get involved. I have no idea if the material has changed, but it did seem sort of outdated and nothing more than I could have gotten from reading Mind over Markets. The material he has on his website, you can get for free elsewhere if that is what you are interested in. Save your money and spend the time reading about the successes and failures of other traders who post. You need to be able to know the difference between truth and fiction. There are lots of fiction writers on this site and there are good people who share their experience with A, B, or C. A good group of traders to ignore are the traders who never lose or only report their wins. They are generally the traders who tell fairy tales.

I thought volume was either available at the end of the day or the end of the week way back. The profile is still a great tool to estimate volume in, say, currencies where there is no volume available.

Put your mind at ease. There is no good reason for using 30 minute bars for the tpo's and there is also no good reason for using volume. It might help a bit to not think of the distribution from an academic perspective.