if i may add:
fear is the result of 4 key things; a significant lack of planning, (and/or) lack
of knowledge, (and/or) capital and most likely, imothho, the lack of a
practised and real-time, practical, proven strategy that's beyond theory
or philosophy (and not from a seminar conducted in hindsight)
fear feeds on fear; when losing (staying in the losing position) fear of missing
out (getting into positions ad-hoc and oversizing)...those things
come from the lack of a proven routine or strategy
trading is the only game that i am involved in that is significantly different to
any activity i do, in that, it involves a non-linear involvement from someone
on the other side of my trade that wants to extract money in the same way
that i am going to take theirs...there is no sentient trader that does not
feel fear in the early days, weeks or months until they fully understand their
own process and that doesnt mean they understand exactly what is going on
in the auction, they dont have to
.....fear is merely telling you that you have hit the limit of
your trading 'existence' beyond which you are fresh meat
as soon as price moves beyond your immediate knowledge, or, capacity
to interpret correct actions required, the fear kicks in and you'll just do
dumb things.....fear is the brains capacity to keep you out of harm but
because trading is not like any other activity you have no reference
point (commonly called experience) from which to formulate a
constructive opinion..you are freshly eaten meat
weak hands and weak money are not the same......a very large account with
no strategy is a weak hand....a small account is weak money ....a small
account with poor strategy is simply a numpty waiting in the auction line
to donate to someone elses account......that's it.....that's all you're doing, donating!
....you are james t kirk of the star ship muppet and if you capitalize yourself
for long enough without quitting the science and
then formulate a strategy you'll get good
at protecting your capital....eventually you'll develop an art, too
while it's true many weak hands get beaten by their own psychology,
in truth it's their lack of strategy that makes the difference...
you can be any personality-type and win..your internal make-up is a deciding factor because you
have not stamped the authority of a strategy (it's not the market, stupid, it's your strategy)
weak hands think discipline is the be all and end all....
oh, yeah, the discipline ruse: discipline to ignorance is not an edge!
(it's not your discipline, stupid, it's your lack of knowledge to enforce a discipline onto!)
get rid of the ignorance, then add discipline = get an edge
weak hands can only ever come to the auction process with the discipline they
already use in other areas and even tho that is true the best disciplinarian will
stay a weak hand with no strategy or unwilling to refine the strategy they do have
discipline, without correct focus within a sound strategy, is lipstick on a pig
disciplining fresh air wont win (it's not the discipine, stupid, it's strategy vacuume in your head)
and beating yourself up over discipline is a complete cop-out
weak hands usually go the "if i only had discipline" route
that route is just another mask
while not all approaches are agreed by all traders (der!) think on these:
a weak hand asks the wrong questions, for example how much money do i
need seems a normal question..... not for a pro trader in the
auction process.....the correct question is what strategy do i need given
the size of my account....do you guys use stops is the wrong question, it's
like watching a youtube video and thinking you can 'learn how to trade'
when what you're learning is an ad-hoc approach to gambling by asking ad-hoc questions
.... stops are the first port of call for weak money/weak hands in that it's the easy answer
to cover for ignorance and ignorance is the seed that grows fear
....stops dont really give you insurance in the way that weak money thinks
......weak money is not looking to be educated and
have insurance,
no, what weak money is asking is how to
feel insurance, how to feel
a sense of safety and stops are the immediacy craved and fulfilled
....ignorance being the seed of fear then false security is manure.....without a proven strategy stops
simply eat away your account and allow you to abdicate responsibility
more importantly, you abdicate your integrity....who you are as a person
is quickly shown up in the auction process, that's true and
you cannot hide your lack
of knowledge because the process of trade over trade is merely time
passing until the truth is found out about your ignorance, but, understanding
yourself is not the key because who you are as a person is
overridden when you get the correct focus with a proven strategy
....at least get the priority of development correct otherwise take
up Tibetan tea drinking...
in their best use, stops reveal to you your real risk/reward ideas because
they often need to be placed beyond the value that makes reward worth the
risk and this simple pratise should wake any weak hand to what they're
actually doing, your stop placement warns you of the validity of your
strategy, it's life expectancy....hence the term positive expectancy,
calculable per trade goes in some way, in toto, revealing there's flaws in
the strategy, so keep refining
weak hands think money management is the key to wealth...what you do get is
a long life of experience as a suvivor and you may get to keep most of your money... it's
like a golfer saying if i hit the ball enough times it'll go in the hole... leaning on money management can become a crutch
yes, integrity is important, honesty is important....but you can have bucket
full of both and remain a weakhand....think: knowledge and strategy
about the process of an auction and the process of the account on the other side of your trade
price is always ahead of your thinking because you enter the present and
await the future to exit and you cannot do that when your thinking is
masked, adding a huge risk by your own disposition......this is the essence
of weak money, of being a weak hand, as they do not come to the
auction process thinking they are weak ....ask a pro what would 'it' take to become
a weak hand or make a large account become weak money and you'll
discover youre either doing, or about to do, everything they say,
plus some....accepting that your lack of strategy is the reason for your losses and that
curing yourself of ignorance, or, agreeing to a method, that is a step
to consistency, that at least afford capital protection...weak money is always
in the mode of making the winning trades, pros are always in the mode of
best protection first and allowing the good trades to build.......weak hands
get emotionally hurt because they use emotive logic to trade, they'll
use theoretic ideas with real money when they should use real trade
functions with theoretic money....they'll use quick-step ideas, that are fine for
a career/salaried analyst, like diagonal lines on a chart when they should be
using (if any) horizontal lines that annotate previous price levels (it's not
the line, stupid, it's the price level), they'll look for historic divergences
instead of current pricing, but, mostly, they try and force a flimsy set of
criteria to get-in-the-game and call themselves a trader.....again, weak hands
are in a rush to score a goal...i liken that to all the guys/girls you see at
football games who wear their fave teams' shirt just waiting for the coach to call
them down to the field to take up their rightful position
😱nline2lo:
when i am trading i often employ a method that has taken a lot of hours to
get right, it requires two parts and the second part i could not teach it via a medium like this page because of
the dynamics involved, in one word: context
you know you are a weak hand when you cannot elocute context of a trade
or series of price moves.....context is abstract in that it's not a
red-light green-light series of events, rather a supposition of not just
what comes next but who has intent to cause a result that comes next and this
is where many traders get caught in the hardware software game, getting
the right platform, right hardware, best speed yadda yadda yadda.....even tho
all those things have a bearing they too mask ignorance......so they dont have the bearing weak hands think they do
knowing/running software just makes you a geek......
how many times have i seen DOM traders get run over, they were not alert to the context of the days trade set-ups,
how many misunderstand volume make-up on a daily basis,
weak hands don't correctly context media/data release and how other traders
are going to use that opportunity,
you know you are a weak-hand when you
think that the right action is the key when waiting for others to take action
is the key....you know you are a weak hand when you do not know ahead
of time specific mechanics that are a function of the auction for that
particular instrument or stock or option......
you are a weak hand when you do not allow for these simple inputs of doing
business, so, you are not trading
with the auction you are merely
trading because there
is an auction......dumb dumb and dumb
at some point your propensity gets found out,
if you're lazy outside of trading it'll come into back into your trading,
like a wake-up call....see, even with a great strategy you're prone to being yourself.....
the difference is that a weak hand wont make that solid step of a great strategy,
they skip the work ethic, go straight to fail ...to get past the weak hand stage you must create a
strategy that gives you recovery time....
everyone but everyone takes losses, pros take temporary losses weak hands take permanent losses
you are a weak hand when you think that the next winning strategy is to be
fully automated even tho you don't realise you are automating
mistakes (ignorance) too...hft's have a high loss rate, yet, their proven strats give them an edge over other losers by simply
just getting a slightly higher win rate....the difference between the weak hand thinker and a consistent trader is the speed of recovery,
you cannot recover in the same way on talent alone...talent is for television
and comes long after the science....
you are weak hand when you think that the market only needs to be
studied when you're ready to trade....many prop firms wont allow you a
single live trade until you've proven you understand your market with
a demo account and elocute whats in the ladder...that being true what are you doing making live trades when you
can't recite your own risk/reward methodology backwards .....
you know you're a weak hand when the percentage of your edits
are philosophical in content than an actual trade process , in other words,
you talk more
about trading than
how you trade,
when
to trade and
who you are trading against....you are a weak hand when
you think that settling for generalities from books
about trading
not actually
for trading....you know you are a weak hand when you
make more time to talk the concept of trading rather than the incept of
trading, in other words, your energy is in talking up your book of
knowledge rather than refining the knowledge you already have
....concepts
and philosophies
about trading are of no use
when trading .....
all things being equal there is no single way to trade, there is no single right
or wrong that affects all outcomes, however weak hands specialise
in generalities and editing in concepts and philosophies that are
absolutely redundant when the trade is on.....
weak hands are more commonly forced into an action rather than enforcing
an action because they do not have a specific strategy to follow, a course
of actions to take.....while many pros can watch price and know the when
and where they were not born with that knowledge...everyone starts
at zero...so you are self trained or you get trained and the self trained get
run over and over and over and over....
you know you're a weak hand when you are not focused on the
correct editorials/education and of all the chat sites you go to you couldn't
make a list of useful things to practise after reading screeds of posts
from pro-sound-bite personalities (cough)
you know you're a weak hand when you follow everyone who has the
most market probability statistics....it's part of the holy grail chase, they
wont make you trade better, they might give you a warning, historic
warnings are not always useless for strategy, yet great for fear, they add
a dimension to your thinking and not necessarily to price itself.....weak hands
are prone to taking on data as though it is immediately effective on price
when it would not affect your strategy, that's been thought out and
practised and is not a random input, whereas, historic statistics have a high
rate of being meaningless up until after price has already travelled to the
point where any statistical value becomes redundant and while statistics carry
weight or evidence they should not affect your strategy when the time comes
to take action
you know you're a weak hand when you follow social media for people who
have career desk jobs, who are not traders for themselves, who can
make wide-sweeping industry commentary that has noting to do with
your strategy and if it does that probably proves you've got a crap strategy
you know you are a weak hand when you have more 'trading' books
(
about trading) than you have a specific list of trading steps to take
and if you dont have a strategy in writing the odds are pretty good that you
are to remain a weak hand drip-feeding the strong hands
sure, there are a few players who have the brain reflex, speed of intellect
and that special something that allows them to read price and they dont
require charts or indicators or whatever....but, here's the truth, if youre
reading this, it aint you!
the best traders i know always refine their game to suit the game itself......
weak hands think they can do correct study on their own, some can, but
it's unlikely to be you and you're far more likely to lose than win until you can
put a strategy list on paper....... it proves you have focus on at
least one part of the auction process and you can work your limited
power within its boundaries, refine the small knowledge you do have...it's called
running a business
that the best traders are constantly refining their game should tell you one
thing that's true: there is no holy grail.....what there is is a launchpad that
is your written strategy....frankly, if you scoff at the idea or think it
too hard........quit now....
you know how much effort a football player goes thru to get to the top of
their game to earn the big dosh...it's a big effort...but all that wont
mean anything unless they have a team manager or coach
.........so if you think that you'll be a good trader without taking
basic steps to achieve the results you say you want, well, you're a
weak hand forever.....your strategy is your manager, at least something solid when 'discipline' fails
pros have a plan, weak hands think they'll wait till they become a pro and then employ a plan
Brett Steenbarger once said something that made a major difference to
me (paraphrased): that trading is the study of trading when you are not active
in the market and if you have no interest in watching price when you're
not trading then you are not a trader......
Eventually, you have to have the correct focus to be a consistent trader and
if you do what all weak hands do which is to use a circumspect group
of whishywashy ideas then your failure rate will lift until you quit and you'll be
a vastly experienced weak hand with no strategy
and no
money....
coming back to that initial answer of honesty/integrity.. do you honestly
have the knowledge, do you have a strategy that gives you a
reasonable win-to-loss ratio....ignore all the stuff about knowing
yourself, answer the question, do you have the integrity that comes from
a strategy that you know works?
if i was to tell you that your task is to find a weakness in the auction process and exploit it and that
would become your edge where would you look? The edge is in your strategy over your ignorance.
you stop being a weak hand when you stop kidding yourself
i hope this is of some help to you......this is just my thinking in a few small bites and while it lacks all the specificity i use, i look back and think that some of this would have made a great deal of
difference considering i had no tutor with only a fraction of the available software ......
what's interesting to me is that the basis of a weak hand, to stay a weak hand, that's not changed...
the auction process may get incremental changes, people do not....
dont go stupid on understanding yourself, get entrenched in the idea that doing things differently is the key
you can always go back to being a tw@t, a muppet, a numpty.....fine, you do that.....but if you want to get
away form being a weak hand you have to do what strong hands do...
it's a business, money making money......treat it that way, get a strategy for this business
if you can see yourself in a continuous refining mode (not the same as an education wheel for mice) then each piece of the strategy that becomes your own art-formula, based on the science and construct of the
auction process, then, you create your edge through that process of refinement....
you wont give up that edge and you wont give it away - you'll stop being a weak hand.
everyone comes to the auction process with some insight on price movement because theyve seen
people negotiating all the time...... what weak hands do is to complicate many simple tenets and simplify
that which requires indepth study that make the auction process workable....
Julian
==============================================================
