jaaks

Traders lose primarily because the primitive part of the brain is wired to avoid loss and the primitive brain makes all the decisions. Once we incur a loss trading, we try to recoup the loss. This usually means riding the loss down to greater losses until the pain gets too great. Then we bail at a huge loss, with a lot of emotional pain. This loss is burned in our memory and subconsciously we we start trying to get the money we lost back. Let's be clear. This is occurring subconsciously. You are not aware it is happening. That is why you repeat the same behaviors, and lose over and over again even thought your higher brain know it is wrong. By the way, the higher brain will think of sort of excuses to justify the primitive brains actions. None of which are true. How do you counter this strong, unconscious force? First you need a plan. The first part of the the plan is cash management. You need goals based on the type of trading you are doing. You need strict loss stops above all, how much money you are willing to lose for the type of trading your are doing and if you hit it, you are DONE! The same go for profits. Once you reach you profit goal, never, never lose it. You can keep riding the the profit train in the market let's you but if it reverses and returns to your min profit level, you are OUT! Once you have experience in the market, you can alter the latter part by taking partial profits and increasing your position size for really obscene profits but never, never violate your daily loss rule. Never. Keep a log and study it. You will find the best ratio of win to lost based on your trading style. Why is the stop amount so important other than the obvious? Because starting out, you are likely going have more losing trades than winners. But you can still make money: Say you set a stop at $100 and it cost $2.00per buy and sell and the slippage is $.01/share and you profit goal is 4 times your loss amt. This means you could lose 3 times for every win. A 75% loss rate in trades. After 3 losses, you will have lost $312 + the slippage. That amount is based on the number of shares. Let's say it is 300 shares. so the slippage is $3. So your total loss is $315. The next trade in profitable, so you gain $396. You have profit of $81. If you do this every day, your profit is $405/wk. Couldn't live on this amount in America, but by increasing the amount, you can get to the point you could. But the best way is getting a win / loss ratio greater than one. Then you really make money. The only way to do this is accumulating trading time. If you could get to 3 wins for every loss, then your gain per day is 873 or $4365/wk. You could live on that! Note: this would be a very good winning ratio and depends on the stocks you trade and the type of trader you are. The fist part of your plan is cash management. The next is a plan of when to buy, when to sell, when to take profit, when to increase your position size. Is there one better than another? Yes, depending on the type of trader you are and the market. Also different plans are needed in different market phases. But every plan fails if you don't relentlessly stick to it. Never vary, never vary, never vary. You can alter your plan when you are not trading, but while you are trading, sick to it. Is there a fool proof trading method? No. If there was, that method would soon get all the profit in the market and everyone would use it, resulting in it's failure as the rules would now have changed. Anyway, if you had a system, would you let anyone know about it? Not likely! At best, you could come up with something that work for the market conditions at that moment but would fail when the conditions change. "The market is always the same, the market is aways changing." There are plenty of adaptive black box systems that supposedly are using fuzzy logic and neural programming. From what I know, their ratio is 35% winners, 65% losers. And they make money hand over fist because they have strict rules and they never vary from them.