Do you ever make mistakes?

MY BIGGEST MISTAKE IS 1 use two holes , a long hole for shorts and a short hole for longs.Golf is a walk in the park .

I foolowed advice from Wackypete.
 
meanreversion said:
Does anyone track these errors, i.e. keep a log of the situation and the monetary consequence? Furthermore, what is an acceptable error loss as percentage of total equity, I imagine anything over 10 pct would be fairly soul destroying .. ?
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I plot two equity curves and keep them in sight. The first is my account as it actually stands and the second one is my account as it would be if I hadn't made any mistakes (been careless with stops, not followed my plans precisely, pressed the wrong buttons etc). Its quite sobering to see how much I have given away and it concentrates the mind going forward. Could have bought a nice car with the money I gave away last year.
 
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The other mistake that is far too common is for trader to attempt to assimilate all of the macro economic data that come out on any given day.This lead to information overload and paralysis..
 
"You can only do your best. Making mistakes is part of being in charge. You can only hope that they will be small."

Thoughts from Tommy Molto From "Innocent" by Scott Turow
 
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I haven't logged any of my mistakes, I haven't made any yet actually since I've only been going a week. So I'm sure I will, but as of now my worst mistake was one that wasn't, the week before. I fired up IB and logged in, and then opened up NinjaTrader. I was tinkering, looking at different options for starting up a set of automated trading strategies and I found an option in NinjaTrader to flatten all positions.

At this point I thought I was logged into my live IB account, and when I tried it, NinjaTrader decided to flatten my base currency in IB (in GBP) into USD by selling 1,000,000 GBPUSD. After the first shot of adrenalin and a quick check in TWS, I realised I was OK, that was my simulation account. I didn't occur to me until a minute later that I had nowhere near a million in my live account. :jester:
 
I make mistakes all the time. But I control my downside rigorously. I keep losses to 2% of capital. This lets me run an individual trade at larger than a 2% loss if the capital amount is less than 2% and the indicator I use suggests the fall in price is short term.
 
My 3 mistakes are:

1, Taking the trade too early instead of waiting, which ended up hitting my stop-loss, before it reversed and hit my original porfit target.

2, Looking at the small picture. Meaning when I saw a reversal I put the trade in. At first it was going the direction I believe it was going, only to find that it had turned around and went the other direction. I was using the 1 minute timeframe. Had I zoomed out and looked at say a 5/10/15 minutes timeframe, I would of got a bigger picture telling me that it was a pullback and that I should of waited until I was given a signal to take the trade, only this time the otherside so that it wouldn't look like I was trend fighting.

3, My stop-loss. Had I moved the stop-loss tighter (on some occassions). I would saved myself from having to hit my maximum stop which is 10 points. I also remember someone mentioned that you should place the stop a tick above the high or low the candlestick. In one particular situation I should moved the stop-loss a tick below the high of the candlestick, as it would of most likely avoid not only hitting the maximum stop-loss, but also preventan additional loss of 2 points for slippages.
 
Making mistakes is not a bad thing - making the same mistakes again is. Whenever you do something and the outcome is not as predicted, make sure to evaluate what happened and how to prevent it from happening in the future.
 
meanreversion said:
Ok, of course you do. Most errors will cost money (sod's law) but if we're honest, some make money as well.

Most, if not all traders have some sort of system and are painfully aware when they SHOULD have done something but didn't, and it cost money.

Does anyone track these errors, i.e. keep a log of the situation and the monetary consequence? Furthermore, what is an acceptable error loss as percentage of total equity, I imagine anything over 10 pct would be fairly soul destroying .. ?
Click to expand...



I make mistakes, i would prefer to refer to them as judement errors.

I'll explain.

I think of a mistake as going outside the realms of my plan, very naughty indeed.

A judgement error is not the same, this is because the market is dynamically different at times and i'm only human.
 
I think I would put my mistakes into two main categories:

1) Getting my judgement about the market spectacularly wrong, or failing to spot an obvious correlation that I should have spotted. I'm not just talking about getting the timing slightly wrong, but about being completely wrong. The most glaring recent one was failing to spot that the Aussie was falling off a cliff along with the stock market in May. To me it looked like a buy......wrong! It did of course recover not that long afterwards (although not to its former strength, to date), but I was too shell-shocked to join in. I guess a real pro would have been in there though (and I don't mean revenge trading, but just seeing the opportunity, and taking it).


2) What you might generally call money and trade management errors.


Of the two, I suppose the last one is the least forgiveable, as it is the one where you have most control.

Sadly, 1. and 2. are not mutually exclusive.
 
I took last Friday off to play golf and missed a bunch of orders/signals. We had people staying as well, so it was all a bit hectic. Ultimately no financial damage done, but my aim is to cut errors down to 2 a month or less.
 
I make plenty of mistakes. I've enjoyed the trading books by Van Tharp. In one of them, he advises keeping a "mistake journal". I have done that and have found it to be revealing of my weak areas and helpful in reducing the number of mistakes I make.

OptionsMike
 
Mistakes are the lessons that we learn from and since the day i started Forex trading am learning from my mistakes and yes am still doing a lot of mistakes as Forex trading Requires great discipline.
 
I only ever make one mistake: "not cutting a losing trade quick enough." This is the only mistake that can blow up your account. The only other things for me are occasionally missing a trade because I hesitate or answering a phone call just as a trade is setting up. But I make these less and less as I progress as a trader. Also these mistakes will never destroy your trading account. Not cutting a losing trade is the mistake we all need to work on the most. Get this mistake down to zero and you are on your way.
 
My 3 biggest mistakes -

1. trying to go long on individual shares in a bear market

2. over-riding the stop and bearish technicals on a stock because I "knew" it just had to go up

3. day-trading
 
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