You never stop learning really do you.....

So this thread might be an epic fail but in an attempt to tease out some interesting trading related stuff from some of those who have been around here too long, what is the last thing you learnt that had a practical and useful effect on your profitability?

As an example, I will give you my most recent one from about 6.30am this morning to do with stop placement.

So I got stopped out when ES hit yesterday's RTH low around 6.30am this morning - a stop that through habit I place about 1pt below/above the level I decide determines I am definitely wrong.

I took a look at the activity later on about 9am and realised it had rattled around and just pinged me out before doing an about turn. I took from this that my stop placement needs to incorporate current levels of volatility rather than something a bit more static. Ironically exits for me are vol based so I'm surprised I've got away with a non-vol adjusted stop loss for this long. A bit of modelling on losers for the last 18 months showed this would have made an interesting difference.

So that's my recent epiphany today. What's yours?

Thanks Robster. The last thing that hit me was to learn to trade when there is price action and volume. Pick times around market opens and closes, economic reports, etc. and don't be behind your system all day. Dictate your trading on the markets. Not the other way around.

Sorry about the double post. So, my advice is trade when there is action and do anything other than be behind your system all the other times.

robster970 said:

You never stop learning really do you.....

Click to expand...

Markets evolve. Indeed life is an ever changing entity. So must traders evolve to keep pace. When you stop learning you grow stale.

/Philosophy lesson!

By far the biggest issue I've had over the years was revenge trading. The day I finally realized I was costing myself more money that way than by just letting the stop losses do their job and moving on was a major leap in my trading. Losing trades were not the problem. I accepted those. The problem was exactly as you describe...a stop gets hit then the market reverses in your favor. These were the trades where I would reenter without a plan thinking I really was right, I am right, I will be right, and then: ahhh cr@p, wrong again.

Peter

bburkin said:

Thanks Robster. The last thing that hit me was to learn to trade when there is price action and volume. Pick times around market opens and closes, economic reports, etc. and don't be behind your system all day. Dictate your trading on the markets. Not the other way around.

Click to expand...

What had happened to you beforehand that was detrimental - is your trading style so short term that slippage has a big effect when trading off-peak?

It is correct that as traders we never stop learning.

However sometimes we think we have learnt something new and we add it to our trading, only to at some point we figure out it was not such good idea after all.

I think this all part of the trail and error process we have to go through to learn trading. This learning process never ends.