PYenner

James "Tomorrow I will read this and most likely feel embarassed for putting it all out there, but what can you do?" You are doing exactly the right thing. It is the reasoning power of your adult mind that is the hero that comes to the rescue of your wounded and bewildered emotional mind. It does not have the reasoning powers to "fix" the problem, it probably expects you to do the old flee or fight survival thing from the source of the pain. Thing is it doesn't even have enough brains to tell you that it wants the reasoning mind to put the pain to rest, you get to figure that out over the years along with all the other messes you have been figuring out how to clear up. As a 9th grader you didn't have the reasoning toolkit in place, you learned to develop the toolkit piece by piece, thinking about each aspect of the problem, weighing the justifications for it and consequences of it, just common sense reasoning. As you analysed and judged each part of the big bogie, you put it to rest, a little at a time. You provided the rat brained emotions with a fix and they gave you peace, you got on with your life. But you have never been back and examined the rescue job that your reasoning mind did. As a result your rat brain continues to see its stress reaction as an appropriate way to call for a rescue, it does not have enough brains to realise that its signals are way out of proportion to your current circumstances and cause you more damage than the problem it is complaining about. In particular the justifiable anxiety/fear/apprehension of another stress attack is enough to cause a stress attack. It will probably have been the divorce that caused you to develop the reasoning mind that you now have, so it has a payoff even if it comes at a hell of a price. It is your best friend, your ability to be honest with yourself about the origins of the pains is exceptional, it is where most people fall down, they perhaps have an aversion for revisiting the area. It helps to understand that the intensity might have been appropriate to the divorce crisis of a 9th grader's nightmare but is less and less appropriate to adult situations. Progressively get to see the emotions as an unwelcome intruder, not as part of "you", the reasoning mind. Do have discussions between your reasoning mind and the intruding emotion- "you again, what do you want this time, same as last time (ho hum been there, boring and pointless) or something new this time?" "How about you sit over to one side for the moment and let me get on with the stuff I am wanting to do and I will have a talk to you tonight" "Its not like you have much useful to say, I seem to have to do the thinking for both of us and it seems like you cant even talk, sticking knives in me is a bit primative and excessive, there are better ways to communicate". The important thing is that you do communicate with it, thats how you take the intensity out of it, examine the pieces, pull the foundations out from under each provocation, just common sense judgements. That how the 9th grader got his life back together, common sense, one piece at a time. That is still how you do it. Slowly identify the pieces, have a common sense look at it, fix it or dismiss it as appropriate. Perception and honesty. It is probably called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and anxiety are part of the mix. The stab in the heart, cut your guts out stuff is the signal at its worst. It is just asking you to think for it but it has a hell of a way of communicating, can't even tell you what the percieved threat is, you have to poke about in a swamp to get to the bits and pieces that it might be. As you practice reasoning out the pieces and becoming familiar with the signals instead of fearing them, it eases the whole cycle, puts things into more comfortable perspectives. Before the signals become intense, seek out time to talk to them, do not shut them out they will intensify. The early warning stage is when you need to start admitting the intruder into the reasoning process and trying to figure out what the dummy is trying to tell you. The intensity gets way out of proportion to anything sane if you shut it out and refuse to do its thinking for it. "ultimately I had the feeling that I lost control and failed" This is the 9th graders nightmare and it is important to extract the elements of blame and guilt and defectiveness and apply adult common sense judgement to them in order to see them as false apprehensions, they are might be's, bogies, superstitions, they are not justified. As far as the divorce goes, you could have no control, it was not in your hands. You only "failed" to do the impossible, it is the unreasonable nature of the expectation that is a "failure", you emotions don't know what is reasonable, you have to reason that out to put them to rest. Let the blame lie where it reasonably belongs, emotions that are incapable of reason and hang people without a fair trial. Conduct the trial, reason it out, pass reasoned judgement, what can you reasonably expect from a 9th grader? Not even fit to drive a car yet... Can a 9th grader fix a marriage from the outside, while the two adults on the inside have been trying for years and have been reluctantly forced to admit that the battle was lost years ago and that they now can only accept that it is over. They also lived with stress and trauma from it and separating is necessary to remove the source of the pains. You are not to blame for the split, you cannot reasonably be expected to have a magic fix for the split, it ain't your fault, you are not defective for failing to reason out an answer where none exists but you do need to recognize that no answer exists and that no blame belongs with it. Its the same process with each of the pieces, in the end you are likely to realize that the stress signal is the only real defect/blame/obstacle and that it is not "you". That stuffed up mess is what nature inflicts on all of us, a seriously dumn and pointlessly painful inarticulate signalling system that likes to point the finger and the knives at you. It needs its nighmares to be reasoned out and put at ease, it wants reassurance, it is less than an infant, it is rat level IQ stuff, it needs help from the person with the brain. It needs your reasoned perspectives, honest judgments because all it has is unreasoned fears, nightmares. "Yet, I made it all so complex that just before the competition I had a similar feeling and felt out of control, and I failed." This is the stress reaction that comes with the threat of the intensity of the 9th grade nightmare. It is the threatened intensity that you justifiably fear, rather than the competition, mostly you thrive on competition. It takes time and practice to pull the rug out from under the bogie, instead it it pulling the rug out from under you. Seeing it as a bogie, a superstition from the rat brain, is a start, reasoning out what is justified and what is bogie will give the rat brain peace and reassurance. It is progressive, chip away at it, it can be moderated and any moderation encourages further continuing moderation. You also say somewhere that the effort wasn't justified, I take a similar view. The person that won didn't question its worth. One downside of having a critical mind is that you also pass judgements when others don't even ask the question. Your rejection of what you were being taught in school sounds similar, you judged it to be irrelevant. What you don't mention is anger, frustration or boredom reactions to the lessons. It is likely that there was an emotion blocking out the incoming information as fast as it arrived, rejection of garbage. If that is the case, recognize that emotions put up barriers and that the emotion comes from passing a judgement, that stuff is garbage. I suspect you quit because there was nothing being gained from staying, not because you wanted to, quitting annoys and disturbs you, right? You probably saw yourself as the odd one out, defective, nobody alse was having a problem. They didn't question the worth of the material, that is the difference. Your analytical mind probably makes you judgemental, impatient, intolerant and grumpy. That is where thinking more than others tends to get you. Sometimes it pays to be shallow but we don't exactly get a choice. With the intruding emotions that put up barriers to learning, recognize that they come from a judgemental mind. Be less harsh in your judgement in order to set the barrier to one side when you try to learn stuff that you partly believe to be garbage. It makes the learning possible, but still a stuggle, practice helps. These are best guesses, filter out what doesn't apply to you. Hope it is some use.

"I get frustrated that I'm not there yet. But when I start trading, I forget about everything it's just me and the markets. It's like when I used to play soccer, I forget about everything and focus on the game everything else is a blur." That speaks volumes, brilliant. "Maybe you see something here that I don't." No, it was a total guess, looking for clues. Nor is there anything necessarily wrong with changing your mind half way. There are many goals that turn out to be not worth completing and you only see that as you get closer to them. Cutting your losses is then the sensible thing to do. Coming second in my class was my preferred option, you come second in the state and one part of you says it should have been first in the national, another part says wtf good enough. I agree with the wtf good enough part. That is healthy. Even Einstein didn't get where he wanted to go, wtf, be grateful for what does work while it still works coz we all end up senile anyway. wtf. Enjoy more and slave drive less. Finding out what you do want is one of the tougher questions. You have a darn good head on your shoulders, but that may not make things easier, it may make things harder, more complex, too much to balance. Life does not offer many primo options, 2nd or 3rd best may have to be good enough, at least until something better does come up, which may happen once every 5 or 10 years and then only if you are on the lookout for that opportunity. It helps if you are doing something you like, or at least something you liked at the time you started doing it. Expectations and ambitions change with time, thats a good thing not a bad thing. The defensive instinct that is bugging you may be about protecting you from impractical levels of expectation. A first prize is big, but a lifetime of ongoing progress is what we really depend on, a single success does not fill a lifetime. You may find you get bored and frustrated with everything you become competent at (forget perfection) and find yourself looking for fresh challenges. If that is the case, accept it, understand it and expect it. A-type achievers tend to be like that, flushing the john before they have finished peeing. Just grow your asset base along the way, opportunities tend to come in proportion.

It is what we do in our spare time that defines who we really are and where we are going. The mundane habits that take over are the ones that tell you where the rest of your life is headed. Your established habits are your real lifeplan, the real you, the default you that will keep returning until you reject that personality. Only you can save you from yourself, an adult sinks or swims or treads water as a matter of choice, a test of character. You rated the purchase of your car on credit as an achievement. There is no achievement in a credit purchase, that is self deception. It is the car that you can afford to buy for cash that you should be rating your achievement by and that is the car you should be driving. You may have fallen into a drawdown trap, you can't afford to trade, the risk of losses that go with trading become amplified when your equity is low and the pressure comes on and the fun goes out the window. Your ability to trade is related to your net worth, not to your credit rating.

Doc, I am struggling to get this one. At first it seemed obscure. Academic what if, maybe, who cares stuff. A bit Freudian and cartoon-like, too two dimensional, like most philosophy. Kids spend large chunks of both waking and sleeping hours with active fantasy mixed up with reality, enjoying it and learning from it but still "on another planet". You could categorize that as addiction, obsession-compulsion, selective exclusion of reality. It is also very much about learning, test driving our growing image of reality. During the great depression, booze and the movies were two "useless" things that thrived against the odds. People needed to escape harsh realities, be lifted out of a hopeless mire into a childs dream world escape. You could categorize that as addiction, obsession-compulsion, selective exclusion of reality. Hope must survive, not just the body. But I would not say that the intellect is disapproving, however rat brained and counter-productive in an obvious way, in a less obvious way the intellect is studing and judging. Perhaps it is rat on a long leash stuff, perhaps it is blowing a raspberry at a dismal reality. A protest over everything we have learned and been told leading us only to dismay. You seem right on the individual points but I cant string it together. I end up with a pile of feathers not a bird that flies. Reality is never entirely real to us, our internal model of reality is a dream inside our heads, we are fonder of the dream than of the physical reality which can be far nastier than anything we care to imagine. There are large chunks of market reality that I also need to shut out, unpleasant stuff. Now I go chasing a mistress for the pleasant stuff, not for the nasty stuff. The nasty stuff is no mistress of mine. She is only my mistress when we dance in step, not when she steps on my toes. But bottom line is, I am unlikely to ever want to fertilize a forex chart! There aint no procreation motivation, uh uh no way. Keep Freud out of this. Analogy fails. Zero carnal content. To me the promise of the market resembles the promise of the silver screen, to lift you out of the mire, deliver you from some of life's harsher realities. So, yes and no, agree and disagree. Hope is what draws me, hope of deliverance.

Dogpile Your life and your observations have some uncanny similaities to my own. It has been brilliant to hear you speak the same truths that I learned. My parents are supportive yet they totally failed to comprehend that the world had changed in a way that meant my career field could never deliver the Cinderella outcome that they or I might wish. They still express their incomprehension in oafish questions that sting. I take the hurt and try to give a simple clear cut answer that they might understand but without expectation that they will understand. I live with it and work towards happy outcomes, which is about all that matters to them. Their goodwill is with me but their comprehension of the realities remains close to zero. I am grateful for the former and accept the latter as a reality that is unlikely to change. Regards middle and upper management characteristics, I agree with you, for myself I now lack the tolerance to live with that type and self-employment is close to essential for me. There are exceptional companies and individuals within them, I had the good fortune to have worked for one such at the beginning of my career but perhaps it also made me less tolerant of the suited apes that abound in bigger business. I have a suspicion that you will quickly come to loathe working with apes again. You may need to be working with constructive people or on your own. How do you read the company that has a career to offer you, apes or humans? With kids and a mortgage you are up against "hard stops", heavy pressure to perform. Good on you and no wonder that you stress out when the markets are wasting time. Can I suggest to you that you are already performing to an exceptional level and that your frustration with the market peaks when it underperforms and lets you down, denies you progress? I also have a slave driver within me that has the same reaction, I am ready, the market is not, futility, all dressed up and nowhere to go. When the market goofs off we also need to goof off too, but it is not easy when you are driven for the best of reasons. Dogpile, I don't have simplistic solutions to offer you. I do respect your achievement and the character that motivates it. You are not giving yourself full credit for either but that is part of the motivation that keeps you going. I have part time work, the income takes the pressure off trading but the times can compete. A career is full time, it is an either/or choice. You have trading to come back to, you may not have a career to come back to. I love/loathe the markets. With apes in suits there is no love, just a struggle to suppress loathing, I would be struggling to last 2 years without telling them where to go. You can probably expect no comprehension and no meaningful guidance from those around you, only you have the depth of understanding to make the choice. Your choices will shape the superficial judgements that others make of you but that is a smaller consequence to me. I would much rather see you becoming an outstanding success at trading, than another captive monkey in a suit. Neither is an easy path, neither comes with guarantees. Best wishes.

Thank you Warren Anything you can conveniently share would be appreciated, Risk and Money management are on the need to know list.

Reaver I've had no problems with IE on Vista. It was Win Mail that took ages to get going. When I'm having a Win problem that no one else on the planet is having, yeah right, I google until I find a techie forum with some relevant discussion. Like everything else it only sometimes helps. Selectively disabling addons like Adobe can sometimes help to isolate a fault from them. Seems odd that FF also locks up, what do IE and FF have in common? Adobe, Java, arghhh?

Vista Home OS uses 1Gb of ram, trading platforms use nearly 1Gb so a 2GB Vista computer is just too small to run a single platform. Recently got a 4GB computer with Vista Home and a faster than average processor and it runs MT4 at least 4 times faster (visually) than the 2GB XP computer. Up to a few months ago I could run the live account plus two MT4 demo accounts on the 2GB XP computer but the MT4 rebuilds seem to be making it more and more resource hungry. It is now so slow that I get "invalid price" when running just one MT4 demo plus the live account when prices start moving fast. Hence the shift to 4GB plus fast processor and I actually like Vista despite a very long term loathing for M$ and Win, bottom line is that it finally seems to work for me. Never thought I would be saying that. I think with Vista, you have to spend the money, budget computers will not be good enough anymore. Task Manager does not seem to fully report ram usage, I get the impression it ignores swap file and handle impact on memory usage. Charts use handles and handles use memory. XP seems to run out of memory when Task Manager says it has 1/4 to 1/2GB spare. "Disk Full" is the message XP gives me when it runs out of ram and can no longer allocate file handles for the word processor that serves as a journal, good old M$ sigh. Incidently a 20" widescreen monitor set to high definition is brilliant if you use lotsa charts but you need a graphics card with its own ram, avoid the budget approach that has graphics sharing system ram.

When other people impose expectations on you it becomes like a prison or a straightjacket, you rebel because it is not about you, it is about them. If you succeed, they will say it took no effort. If you fail it will be because you are a total loser. Either way they try to rob you of motivation and support. Sometime you will chose YOUR path and to hell with everyone else. The sooner you find your own path the better. Stop listening to the "go nowhere" people. You will have to chose, even though it defines your future, a straightjacket that is voluntarily worn because it becomes one you want to wear. Who are you, what do you want? To me the markets are one thing worth wanting. One way or another, try to get rid of the baggage of other people's expectations and your irritation over their stupidity. They are only trying to run your life because they dont have lives of their own. They are life vultures. Get on with your own choices, your own life. You must chose and claim your own life. Until you do that you have only half a life. Become your own master and to hell with those who would play at being your master/manipulator. You have a bigger job ahead of you in that area than most of us. But it other ways you are well ahead of most. The markets seem to be what you want. If so, identify with it, enjoy it, become it, live it. When you go into battle, leave your baggage behind you. Your hands must be free if your are to win. You have "spectators" sitting on your shoulder watching what you do. We all have that problem in some form. The market is your mistress, it must be just you and her, no spectators. Focus everything on your mistress your pleasure, exclude the spectators, the joy robbers who seek to detach you from your pleasure. Take your pleasure, claim it for yourself, it is your life, live it with a passion not a half measure. In this one pleasure, be a totally selfish bastard and love it full measure. Enjoy the contest, get into it, no half measures, no half life, no vultures, make a score, big time, for real, for you, do it, love it. Expect to get a few bloody noses btw

Thank you Dr Janice The financialsense page has a link at the bottom to 15 archived articles. <<If I can do it, you can do it.>> I tend to think that way too, yet invariably people seem to run in the opposite direction from a challenge. Something very "rat brained" seems to instinctively shut out opportunity, keep us with what we know or want to believe in, the comfort of the known. Enjoyed the talkback radio clips on your website, remarkable performance Dr J, you are certainly one who rises to a challenge.

The recent interest rate rise comes just a few months after the govt complained Sterling was overvalued. Apparently a further rise to 6% is on the cards. NZ has already gone down the road of bumbing up rates to curb inflation, then finding the high exchange rate puts exporters out of business. Thought the Brits would have more brains but thats polititians for you. Sterling near 26yr high- http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=ukPoundRpt&storyID=2007-07-05T073642Z_01_L05223033_RTRIDST_0_MARKETS-STERLING-OPEN.XML BOE to 5.75%- http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C07%5C06%5Cstory_6-7-2007_pg5_17

Shouldn't attempt to do posts (or trade) at 4am... The internal reward is along the lines of the "Eureka Experiance", after a Greek that jumped out of his bath and ran down the streets naked shouting "I have it" after inspiration struck during quite thought, it happens

Hi Doc Your article is spot on. Money is not the only reward and source of motivation. Getting your thinking sorted to the stage where it is effective, is rewarding motivating and calming, there is an internal reward system working within the brain that thrives as it progressively finds better answers, one on top of another. Learning how to learn effectively, a pity it isn't taught in school, perhaps that day will come. The reverse also applies to those who fail. It is not just money that is lost, the brain also implodes in dissonance, there is recognition that the ladder of thinking and testing was not climbed correctly, somewhere a wrong step was taken and not corrected. There is a punishment on top of any financial pain, it might become an aversion. I repeatedly experienced major flip flops in my view of the market while attempting to learn. At times the brain offered me two largely opposing views of market reality and said choose between the two because you can't have both. The dissonance thing and the bouncing to higher and higher cognitive levels for consonance are as you describe. This is presumably where 90% fail, a brain blockage sets in. At school there were some subjects I could not do, total blockage, fortunately I was able to get ahead on the subjects that I could do. Einstein and Winston Churchill had similar problems so lack of intellect is not the sole cause of the problem, though that is how we tend to interpret it, taking it as a personal failure when perhaps we should see it as a challenge. If I had that time over I might have sat down with those teachers and questioned them until I found out what thinking process their subjects depended on. As I get older I simply follow the paths that are still open to me while they are still open and worry less about the paths that seem closed to me. Life is too short. The ancient Greek ideal that a man should excell at all things assumes that a man will live long enough to learn all things and still have time left to do something constructive, it is no longer realistic, perhaps it never was. Selective ignorance is something of a necessity, even if it isn't a virtue. "Because the human brain has an infinite capacity to change, organize and reorganize itself, progression to trading excellence is possible." It also has a remarkable ability to beat the c##p out of itself when it repeatedly tries and repeatedly fails. If that happens, seek a calm time to re-examine things from the ground up, let the realities do the speaking, keep the wounded ego out of it, keep it impersonal, keep your preconceptions a little to the background and be prepared to abandon them because that is the goal of the exercise. Let market realities reshape your conceptions little by little. Doc, you are attempting to teach people how to learn. If humanity ever gets that sorted, physical realities would be our only barrier. Its the one thing we should be teaching in schools, yet its the one thing we don't teach, apparently because we are still struggling to learn it. It seems like a simple question with a simple answer that is somewhere near our fingertips if only we could grasp it.

Nice thinking Don and MK, way to go.

Thats probably why it works. To clarify, If price above sma then accept long trigger signals only. If price below sma then accept short trigger signals only. Maybe a second sort of trigger signal to test against your main trigger signal. Dunno.

If your prices are optimum then sma or weighted average might be tried as a secondary filter for distinquishing better trades from worse trades. Don't trust statistical indicators, prefer straight prices, but if you turn over enough stones maybe something comes up. Just searching for ideas.

Yes, also noticed the frequent retracements but I have not been following cable long enough to know what is normal with it. This is the first week I have traded cable, and I'm also long, but I need more experience with it before I could be any help. I hope you find some clue there that turns out to be useful. Eliminating just a few of the losing trades would make a big difference. Yes, easier said than done but that is where the payoff should be.

I think you did the right thing and should continue to do it, without real regrets. Making money is the easiest part, anyone can do that temporarily, keeping from losing money is by far the more difficult and decisive part in getting ahead. You got profit and safety when you closed, that is as close to perfection as you can expect in a uncertain world. I am not a fan of sticking absolutely to plans that will always be simplistic compared to the complexity of a market. An experienced and cautious brain is every bit as important as a paper plan. Using your judgement will make your stats harder to follow but you are in it to win, not to play games with stats. Rules are made to be broken, when there is justification for breaking them, you had good justification. When you do intervene it will often look like the results were 50:50 and you wonder if you are achieving anything. I say yes, safety is priceless, it comes ahead of a few extra points of profit.

Don Forgive me if I am way out of line here. I was following Cable at the time some of your sells went bad. The thought I had then was tweeking up your trigger price might have avoided the bad ones but i'm only guessing at an answer. Of course it might cost you just as many good trades and it might reduce the optimum tp and screw up the whole thing. So the next thought was have two trading plans, one for a rising market as in past months and a second one with wider trigger price for the flat or uncertain market we have now. As you say you are getting a lot right, the thing is to "mine" the recent failed trades for differences from normal trades. Losing trades are the best to examine for any improvements that might be made. They are just stray thoughts, apologies if they seem shallow or off target.

Doc The wellbeing/balanced sensation that comes with meditation is associated with alpha wave brain activity but I cant associate it with any single chemical. Do you know of which chemical or chemicals seem to be beneficially involved? May not be a simple answer. Also depression tends to go with dopamine suppression, or have I got that back to front? I wonder why they dont sell dopamine instead to prozac, I don't trust that stuff, too many suicides when they come off abruptly. Might be better to stick with natural stuff imo.

Hi James You will find constructive people here willing to help with a new market or plan if you need it. Gee wish I had know about markets at age 19, it sounds wonderfully promising, especially the fact that you enjoy it and learn lessons from it. Yes, your thinking is your best friend and your worst enemy in this game, you seem to have a lot sorted out already. I hope it keeps on getting better and better for you. Good luck James

When the kids get big enough to turn a doorknob you may need one that locks, they will be happy to copy Dad, playing on the keyboard. Consider keeping coffee whatever in your room, the less you pop out for things the better it reinforces the "gone to work" time/area.

There are some very special times. Enjoy

Whoa, dopamine is pretty damn good too, and its untaxed

Agree 300%, very difficult to leave your future blowing in wind, day after day. Can understand now why many people just can't live with that. It is a battle all on its own, on top of the other efforts. Thanks for the figures, they will need lots of thought before any comment. I doubt if many people are getting typical results at this time.