Dont try to be someone else...

There is a great post from Dr. Brett Steenbarger again.
The Video shows what happens if you try to be someone else / copying someone else...
I had same experiences aswell, so i can agree with it ;-)

So many times before i tryed to adapt others trading style / pseudo-trading style and was never successfull with it.

Everyone has to identify itself with everything he does. none will ever succeed in trading whith copying someone else when he has another mindset.

In my opinion, trading is 95% psychological and 5% knowledge and not vice versa.
And in my opinion, this is the reason why 95% of all traders fail in their ambition to make continuous profits.

I DO IT MY WAY !


Here are the links:
http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2009/04/illusions-and-blowup-of-trader.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu-8wGbWMro
http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2007/11/doll-face-trader.html

status uptick rule

as most of you know, the abolishment of the uptick rule back in 2007 caused the financial cirises we are in right now. So the only wy back out of the crisis is to reinstate the uptick rule somehow.
sounds easy huh ;-)

I dont know how it would affect your trading, but it would definitely affect mine.

Here are the latest posts regarding this toppic. I will update it from time to time:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/08/news/economy/sec_shortselling.reut/index.htm?postversion=2009040812

http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/24/markets/modified_uptick.reut/index.htm

the quote tracker paint bar indicator

about a week ago, i´ve red a comment over there in the traderam-blog.
here is the link:
http://traderam.blogspot.com/2009/03/trades-30mar2009.html

Before i´ve see this post, i didnt know about the abilities of quotetracker in this section.

Some post´s before, i was writing about the only reason so far for a possible switch to esignal, to make it possible to visualize my setups. After reading this comment to the post in traderam´s blog, i was googeling some paint bar related links and after a short while i was able to put some paintbar indicators online in my charts.

It is a big help to have my setups visualized and it saves time and stress. I think it was yesterday, when i came across the idea, to implement one more paintbar indicator.
The purpose of this indicator is to help me stop trading 40 minutes after market open.
After i made myself a easter present while archiving a intermediate goal, i spent some minutes regarding the development and after a short time it was done. It is a realy simple indicator that paints all my workingdesk in a loud red color that cant do anything else but causing headache when looking longer at the charts then my rules are made for...

On monday i will give it a first try and lets see if i can handle my biggest problem better whith the support of this nice indicator ;-)

One thing is clear again, we can all learn from each other and dont have to pay anybody for anything ;-) ...at least in certain areas in trading ;-)

Have a nice easter !

how do i trade right now

At the moment:
I focus on stocks that gap for some reason with high volume.
I have a 5 Minute as well as a 1 Minute chart for every stock i track.
I track up to 9 Stocks at the same time and dont change them during the trading day.
I usualy do not trade within the first 10 minutes.
I stop trading 40 minutes after market open (this is the rule i have the biggest problems with...)
I trade higher lows, lower highs, basebreakes and i´m looking for price contraction zones to open the trade.
I tend to stop trading after i made fix +3R. So when there is no open position, then its the plan to stop trading for the day.
I allways risk the same dollar amount in every trade i make (1R).

So my rules didnt change in general, its quite the same as in the beginning.

fell back to bad trading yesterday

I dont like such days, but they still happen. Yesterday i thought i could optimice my risk reward ratio when changing my size-calculation. It didnt work. Instead of making things easyer (this was what i thought, because i liked to reduce the hectic around each trade), things got more complicated. Until my 30 minutes of regular trading i was down about 2R, which is noch that bad but also not good. I should have called it a day, but what happened ? I "thought", which was the problem, i "thought" that i could make this 2 R back within minutes trading the original entry/exit strategie. But instead of recovering, i fell into a bad trading procedure, took trades that where after my maximum time, with other setups i usualy trade etc. etc. etc.

This got worse and worse and i had about -7R at the low of the day. Then there where 2 good trades who got me back to -2.5R for the day, but instead of now stop trading, i traded further and stopped with about -5R. This sucks and doesnt feel comfortable. I have to work more and more on my psychological attitute, which in my opinion, is the KEY to success.

Today i made some money back and have made about +4.3 R

I HAVE TO TRADE THE RULES, AND ONLY THE RULES !!!