MightyMouse

If you really think you have psychological issues, you should get an assessment done by a professional. If there is something wrong with you that is detrimental to trading, then you simply shouldn't trade. If there is nothing wrong with you, then reading a trading psychology book isn't going to help. All of those books have the authors bias as to how you should think if you want to be a successful trader. The author is not a successful trader so his guess at how one should think is as good as yours. There is nothing wrong with your mind if you can''t make money trading or if you can't make enough money trading. It is a zero sum game that has entry and exit costs. It is simply difficult. Most likely if you are coming up negative, then your plan probably has failure built into it and no matter what you do, you will continue to lose. If you are turning a profit, then there is nothing else to do but trade. MM

I see dead people when I trade.

Make sure you try your strategy under many different market conditions before you start trading live. When volatility picks up, you will likely get killed if you decide to double your position size on a whim the way you did on this day.

Success Rates of Traders There are a few studies that were done. Most seem to focus on success over a 12 month period which doesn't really tell you much.

When the market is rising, traders are deciding that they no longer want to wait to buy lower. So, either a long is aggressively buying at the offer, or a seller is dumping his short by either getting stopped out or simply buying at the market. When the market is dropping traders are deciding that they no longer want to wait to sell higher so they are either entering their short aggressively at the bid or they are exiting a long because of a stop or are hitting the bid with a market order. Each scenario will continue as long as there are orders to be filled.

MMS, Disagreement is good. My point regarding the above is that if during the back test period trades where taken that resulted in the system being over leveraged and those over leveraged trades contributed to the positive expectation of the system, then if you want to trade the system, you have to expect to get over leveraged. Whatever you do to generate the edge in the back test, you should do exactly the same in real time to gain that same edge if you are of the mindset that you can trade mechanically. If that means over leveraging then, then you have to over leverage, if it means trading without a stop, then you have to trade without a stop. You can't data mine and expect to duplicate the same results or make them better. If he didn't want to get into a situation where he had 10 times the risk in 10 correlated positions, why did he? Is it the systems fault or his fault? If you are running an EA on 10 currencies at the same time, you have to expect that at some point they are all going to have some bullish or bearish reaction to the, say, US dollar, and a system will generate a signal that can end up being wrong and you will pay with 10 times the hide. MM

If the system he is trading gives him an edge, he should take every single signal the system gives him. Otherwise, the system only gives him signals and it is his discretion that gives him the edge. In which case it isn't much of a mechanical system at all. Its a finite set of instructions that paints a green or red dot when a,b,&c happens. The system should take into account whether or not there is a lot of capital betting in related instruments in the same direction. During the back test that provided the positive expectancy, you, then, have to expect that there were also instances where the system bet in the same direction on multiple pairs and it led to a positive result. That was OK, but its not OK when betting in the same direction leads to a large draw down. Can't have you cake and eat it too. Accept the draw down or return the system for a refund. MM

I'll pass and trade it vicariously through you. Good luck Curious, though. You lost half your account with it. Why do you think it has an edge?

Forgive my ignorance, but what is SST? Also, what was the draw down during your back test period and how many different 2 month periods did you look at?

I am pretty sure they have controls in place to try to close you out so that they do not begin to risk their own capital. They make you responsible for your losses, but they ultimately answer to the clearing firm. Brokers do take losses.

Of course stop hunting happens. A stop on a long position is a willing seller to someone who is short and needs a seller below the current price to buy from at a profit. If they find stops they can cover. If you are a weak long, eg., your stop is really small, then they will find you frequently and you will think its a conspiracy, its your broker, etc. The fact is that your stop on that particular trade was simply too close and the order flow did not reverse in time to save you. Widening your stop will help protect you from getting stopped out because of excess noise, but it will help and hurt almost equally since it opens up the possibility for you to make more mistakes.

Now that I think about it, I think TS is more than 1000 too.

Mirus Futures Infinity Futures Tradestation IB Amp Futures You can find the phone numbers on the web. Each has a different margin requirement to daytrade, but none, as far as I know are over $1000. You cannot hold the contract overnight. And, I believe that if you do try to hold the contract beyond some terminal time, that they will close you out. That is, for instance, if you try to hold 4 contracts for one session to the other with only 10k in your account. MM

Have you tried to trade these? I have. My experience was neutral. I made some money and lost some money. I traded them mainly in a small currency account. I didn't find them to be profitable so I stopped. I forgot the guy's name who was nice enough to code the patterns in MT4 (something with a Z). The indicator was really nice, but It wasn't adding anything over time. It could have been me too. I am not one to blindly allow a trade to stay on simply because its a pattern that sometimes works. Regards, MM

if you see 10 going off at the bid, then you are seeing a match of 10 market to 10 limit buy or 10 market sell partially filling a larger limit buy order. If the order was smaller than 10, you would see the individual smaller orders summing to 10. If you see a trade going off at the bid, it is because someone does not feel like waiting for price to sell, they are selling lower now.

Whenever I have doubled up on a trade that went against me, it was impossible for me to resist wanting to get out at break even. At the time I did not have the nerve to stay in the trade with the larger trade size and has happy to take the trade off at BE. This behavior is account destructive. When the trade would go against me and i would add and take it off BE, then the best i could do on this trade when it happened was zero profit - commissions or lose what ever my sell stop was with the higher contract number. If you do that trade 1000 times, you are a guaranteed loser since the best you can do is zero profit and the worst you can do is what ever your stop out is on the higher contracts. Removing this behavior turned me into a break even trader. I still don't do it because i never learned how to allow the larger position to continue to the objective, but I do see and know that there are times when this is a perfectly good strategy if you are a guy who can ride it properly. If the objective is to be out by the end of the day, then I prefer to admit failure as quickly as possible and start chopping. I would rather take the small loss and decide if i want to get back in higher or lower, if the trade is still right. I said earlier in the thread, there is no better barometer that your entry might be wrong than negative equity on a trade. To do this you have to accept that you will potentially be buying or shorting at a worse price after taking a loss. Regards, MM

I do not think that anyone who practices it is bullshitting, just you.

I should have known you have a sixth sense. You want us to believe that you are Superman. Can you bend steel with your mind too? Bullshitting on line is fun for you isn't it?

A cheetah does have everything it needs to catch prey. However, a deaf cheetah can still catch prey, but he is at a disadvantage to the cheetah who has all his senses. Since a deaf cheetah is at a disadvantage, then it would be disadvantageous for a non-deaf cheetah to deliberately plug his ears when he is hunting for prey. I hope that is clearer for you. I didn't think the original version was so easy to misinterpret. My mistake, i suppose. You have lots more information available to you than just time and sales. A trader who uses only time and sales can, probably, still make money, but he is at a disadvantage to traders who do not limit themselves to time and sales when there are many more tools available. I have put lots of time into reading order flow and use time and sales when I trade. However, I will not limit myself to only using time and sales when I trade. If you want me to believe that you are superman and can gather all the time, price, and volume information available from t&s that other traders can using a multitude of tools, I won't. Tape reading is helpful and can still be done in certain markets, but it is antiquated with the vast amount of technology we have today.

We have information we can derive from price, time, and volume. If you limit your sensory input, from p, t, and v, you limit your potential. Similarly, a cheetah stalking a baby gazelle in the Serengeti, can still succeed if it were wearing ear plugs and using only sight and smell; however, there are times where sound would give it the extra edge. If when you say you don't use charts, you mean that you don't trade chart patterns, then that is a different story. A chart is a nice and simple record of where price has been and It's an easy way to see where other traders may act. Why not use it?

Guys who traded that way in 20's and 30's did it that way because there was no alternative and not because it was the best way to do it. Also, most stocks on the NYSE had maybe a few hundred trades a day. so few that you could count them as they happened. If you're actually making money, you'd probably make a heck of a lot more if you didn't limit yourself to only T&S.

You have an interesting sense of humor

Funny. I too was in Reza's room for a day back in about Feb or march of 2008. I was interested in market profile at the time and I saw that he was consistently posting profitable trades. I, naively, figured that if there were people in the room that he would not post fake trades on his website because they could easily call his bluff. I figured i would give it a one day trial and if it was worthwhile, i would pay for the lifetime membership. His MP analysis back then was OK and he lost money that day and stopped trading. I am OK with that too, but he then tallied up the trades that he both took and didn't take and that was the number he posted on his website. He lost money and he posted a positive result. That was enough to keep me away. That was in 2008 so maybe its different now.

A lot of negative equity on a trade is a really good sign that you are wrong. You can always get out quickly and get back in if the trade is still good. I am referring mainly to day trades where time is of the essence.

Scaling in as price climbs makes more sense to me. I don't like adding when price is falling. Simply a personal preference. Professionals are professionals until they run out of luck.