gosu

Forums - Exact Science Looks like a set of rules to me.

You are just making that up. Whether or not you agree that it can be done, a complete set of rules is exactly what is intended. Maybe you aren't aware of the latest transference method: the flowcharts with n, n+1, and n+2.

You seem unaware of blatant contradictions in what you say, but I do agree with this statement. The point of all this learning is to be able to extract. If you can do it and don't need to ask questions of others, then that's great. I took the time to answer a person who is not at your level and threw something out there to expand his line of thinking. Evidently, my "beyond Hersheyland" phrase rankled you and probably others. It wasn't meant to step on any toes. Don't worry about what I say. Just continue with your extracting. Cheers.

Your implication to stick to the literal word of Jack is a bit odd seeing that you are dismissive of using volume. As you say, there is no "need" to add anything to understand the basics. Nonetheless, a lot of things have been added over the years by Jack himself to help understand the basics, and some things have been discarded (maybe "replaced" is a better word). What can be more basic than anticipating a point 3, or for the person asking the question, a new point 3 after fanning? Since you seem to look upon Spyder as an authority, I recall seeing Spyder using a 20-period moving average on the 5m chart which is heretical to the Hershey script. The point is, if it helps to understand the basics better, use it.

If you use a new p1 it wouldn't be "fanning" but the drawing of a new channel. The chart you posted shows the fanning off the original p1. Learning as much as you can about fanning is time well spent. If you can reach a level of understanding where you not only anticipate fanning to occur but can annotate potential RTLs before the "new p3" forms, you will be advancing into territory beyond Hersheyland.

I was referring to your choice of occupation as a therapist in general. But fair enough, you refer to your current practice with traders. I've parsed your post below and replied accordingly. I think I'm alright but I do not consider myself an expert trader. Among the traders I know who trade index futures intraday, there is one person I consider an expert. My comment was I don't think everyone who attempts trading is suitable for it. I didn't state or imply that a person has to reach a certain level by a certain time to be suitable for it. In my case, I did not learn very fast and repeated the same mistakes many times before I eventually caught on and changed my behavior. I attribute my slow learning to a natural stubbornness and years of school and work that rewarded being right or winning and punished being wrong or losing, the kind of thinking that is not helpful for trading. If you want to call it "psychology" that is fine with me. However, I did not think hidden demons were the cause of my being a lousy trader so I never bothered to look for them or seek help from someone who told me they were there and that I had to undergo an exorcism in order to trade better. I knew that I simply sucked, wanted to get better and was fortunate to see ways to improve doing things. The hard part was training myself to actually do them. For me, my life is the context and I view trading within that context. Trading gets me to where I want to go in an enjoyable way. I share your premise that a lack of success does not necessarily mean a person is not suited for trading. However, your conclusion that "psychology" is what stands in the way of success is merely your opinion as a professional therapist. It may be just a part of the problem. You do not trade so it is beyond you to understand from your position what it takes to extract from the markets. I do not object to any of these statements. The question is, can everyone or most people be "good enough"? You say the answer is "yes" and it's their psychology that's preventing them. That is not my experience which includes working in an office with dozens of traders. This is a very naive viewpoint. Money is an enabler. Nothing more. While it may be true that your beliefs about the self are important in life, in trading your beliefs about the market are no less important and probably much more important. This is the aspect that you disregard. People are not born with an understanding of how markets operate. In the process of learning by following conventional paths, they pick up a lot of myths about trading that they mistake as truths. Or even worse, like you, they believe there are no market truths and that one belief about how markets work is as good as another and move on to beliefs about their self and their relationship to money. I have yet to see a struggling trader who exhibits a deep understanding of how the market he trades works. Invariably the method he has devised or bought as a package to put his superficial understanding into practice is so lacking in completeness that it is in essence just a coin flip, stop loss, profit target approach with some position-sizing calculation thrown in. Ask a struggling trader how he determines a retrace from a reversal and you get a puzzled look. These are people who have never used a reversal order because they do not know that's how markets operate. They are too busy getting stopped out and thinking "Whew! I'm glad I had my stop-loss in place on that one!" I know none of this registers on your radar. Not to worry, it's probably the same for the people who take your course. Conversations about money? Other than with close family, I avoid that as much as possible because there is simply no benefit in it for me. I am unsure if you think a person who knows how to trade index futures intraday can get to a level of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett. It is funny to me that people who don't know how to extract get out their calculators and start compounding some small number of points into the future and come away with the conclusion that either extracting can't be done or the person doing it will eventually own the world if he continues. Even disregarding liquidity issues, what's the point of explaining that sweeping my accounts every month and not compounding are the keys to my longevity in the markets? They cannot possibly understand anyway. I like being supportive of others. Sometimes money is required to do that and sometimes money is not helpful. In any case, most of what I extract on a monthly basis goes to others which is what gets me up in the morning and keeps me going. I share that sentiment.

You chose an occupation that deals with people's exposed laundry so I am not surprised you enjoy it. I will not disagree that trading CAN cause people to act out their dramas. However, I don't think it is necessary or even helpful to make trading out to be more than what it is. After you get to a point where your trading accounts represent a small portion of your liquidity and what you extract in a year has no bearing on any decision, it is easier to see that trading is just not that important. Trading is just a neat way to extract resources and keep all the faculties sharp. That's great you are inspired. But pardon my ignorance, because the way it looks to me is that the cause of mediocrity is not unhealed wounds but that people go into trading who are just not suited for it. Let's be specific: You find it wonderful to work with struggling traders. That is not trading. What does this mean?

Hi Rande, Glad to be of help. You already know my comments are not personal. Moreover, I have not criticized your webinar per se, as I have no experience with it. I see myself as someone who can have an open mind about things. Thus, I can be open to the idea that a therapist might be helpful to a trader as a nutritionist or a physical trainer might be helpful regarding peripheral but important things connected to performing. Such a person would already know how to extract from the markets but for whatever reason is struggling to get his shit together and just do it. It is my feeling that there are very few people in this category. In any case, I will be checking out the forum and will squawk in with a comment if I'm overcome with desire to do so. Best of luck with your webinar.

Welcome to the world of trading. What is it that you are trading? I see horizontal lines in your volume pane but I don't see the values. If you trade the ES, what is the day of the chart? I might be able to provide a more thorough response.

And yet you still promote yourself here. So what's your point exactly?

Hi Rande, I have no interest in either applying for a scholarship or paying for your course. My time is valuable to me and there would have to be a compelling reason for me to do either. I made the offer to review your course for this community because it is curious to me that your course is purported to be helpful to traders who are struggling when you do not know how to extract from the markets yourself. The offer of a "scholarship" is touted as something valuable when the course may be an utter waste of time or, even worse, lead a person to learn incorrectly. Here is my opinion that I bring to this forum. One of my favorite chess books is "Think Like a Grandmaster." The author, Alexander Kotov, was a grandmaster, and a very strong one at that. He came out of the Soviet chess school and played at the highest levels of tournament chess. I am not a grandmaster, but when I studied his writings I felt confident that I was reading grandmaster-level insight and analysis--getting a look at the "grandmaster mind," if you will. You teach a course called "Developing Trader's State of Mind." I do not think it is unfair of me to ask, how does a person who does not trade know what a trader's state of mind is? Did he read trading books? Talk to a lot of people who call themselves traders? Attend seminars? Those are the same things the people signing up for courses like yours have done. If I wanted to obtain a grandmaster's mind, I might start by picking the brain of an actual grandmaster. Fortunately, in chess it is easy to verify that the person claiming to be a grandmaster is in fact a grandmaster. Even with that, however, I would not be fully aware of what a grandmaster mind is until I became a grandmaster myself. I don't think it's much different in trading.

I like to have them just in case I do need to review something. Who knows when the next screwup occurs that I need to go back and thoroughly debrief? If I had the time, I would love to review the entire session at the end of the day or evening. Unfortunately, I have to consider mundane things like eating, exercising, resting, taking care of day to day living chores, etc. There's only so much one man can do in a day.

I record the entire day and premarket when there are major announcements. Sometimes I will record the night session if I'm trading. When I started the recordings, I used them to go over my screwups (in normal speed) to see what I was monitoring at the time. It was quite helpful to see replayed how my monitoring was almost always spot on but my stubbornness led to ignoring what I was monitoring. Nowadays I rarely go back to review the recordings. This is more because of lack of time than anything else. I have no doubt that there's a lot more to learn in the videos.

I like to keep focused on the monitoring as much as possible and avoid explanations or reasoning in the audio. That way, if I review a segment I know exactly what I was picking up in my sweep of the screens.

Recording the trading day is very good. I monitor aloud and record that as well. I recommend it highly.

Whether or not your motives are altruistic, you are plugging the webinar through your "scholarship" announcement. It doesn't bother me one bit. As I stated, I was just curious as to why he would go through you, given the lax vendor oversight on this site. It was just idle curiosity. I take it that you are a satisfied client and thus the reason for your endorsement. I am rather skeptical as you already know. But I limit my skepticism to what I've gleaned from his posts and articles since I am not a customer.

So you are operating on your own and without his knowledge. OK, that clears it up a bit. It would seem that the site owner does not prohibit getting free advertising so I was just curious as to the method of plugging the seminar via the offer of a "scholarship" through an agent.

Just curious as to why Rande is not touting the webinar and the "scholarship" himself. I am in a feisty mood and offer this challenge to Rande: If you are up to having your webinar reviewed by a seasoned trader, offer me a scholarship and I will attend your webinar with an open mind and upon its completion I will provide a thorough and brutally honest review to you and this community.

Might as well be an official holiday, as Columbus Day is usually. One good move from the open and then the market went into dry up before the morning was over. Even the move off the open was on medium pace. It looks like a trend day the way price is behaving, but with the funky volume, my volume calibrations are all off. It's a brief day for me. Happy Columbus Day.

I understood what you did - overlaying the RTH onto the AS daily bar. My question was if your conclusions were the result of research you did, and if so, would you care to share it. Giving another example, even one "that plainly demonstrates the point," doesn't add anything to further the discussion. I get it that that's what you believe. If the basis of your statements is purely anecdotal, that's fine. My observations differ from yours and thus I would not reach your conclusions. My experience is that the overnight session leading into the open is very informative of how the morning trading will go. By morning, I mean specifically up to around 8:40 to 8:50 pacific time. I do not ascribe this to any particular overnight activity by foreign "professional traders" but to the simple notion that the 6:30 cash open does not affect the ongoing sentiment for the futures market that has been trading continuously overnight. Beyond the morning session, I give what happened overnight less and less weight, except indirectly to the extent the sentiment has carried over into the AM. Midday is mostly for mealtime and calibrating myself for the PM startup. By the time PM trading arrives, the overnight session is irrelevant. These are just my opinions, of course.

Do "amateur" traders, as opposed to your "professional" traders, have any impact on the direction of the market? I think we all know the answer to that question. How much do your "professional traders" impact the market? I guess that depends on who you are counting in your group of "professional traders." Who are the real movers of the market? If you can answer this question you can see that they require something that the people who operate during off hours do not. This is a remarkable statement. You must have done some research to back it up. Care to share it with the rest of us who monitor the all-sessions and do not see such a correlation? I am sure this whole community would be greatly appreciative.

That is not a viewpoint we have in common. Sure, events in Asia and Europe can influence trading here; e.g., tsunami, Greece, etc. But to say that traders in Asia and Europe set the tone for the US markets is a stretch. Especially Asia, which is a follower mostly.

The 24-hour trading range, which includes the RTH, is often greater than the RTH range itself? You don't say....

So basically you are speaking of a general attitude. Got it. I misunderstood the meaning of what you wrote. I saw the reference to managing a trade and thought you were discussing a specific technique. I suppose "Don't beat yourself up" is specific enough. But that is so basic that it should be a given.

Thanks for the reply. I snipped the part of your article that led me to ask what you meant by "self-soothing." You say self-soothing is self-compassion. Pardon me for being a bit dense, but if I replace "self-soothing" with "self-compassion" in that sentence, I'm not much better off in my understanding. You give an example of what is not self-compassion: self-compassion is not beating myself up for making a mistake or being "on the wrong side of probability in a trade" (I take this to mean the trade was a loser). But if you were to instruct me in how to "keep the uncertainty of managing the risk from snowballing into fear or panic" by the use of self-compassion or self-soothing, what exactly would I be doing? Am I saying nice things to myself while I'm in a trade? Am I thinking how wonderful life is and all is well? Can you be more specific as to how I would use self-compassion to manage a trade in which I'm dealing with uncertainty so that it doesn't snowball into fear or panic? What exactly am I doing, thinking, saying, etc. while I'm in the trade?