Hi Guys. It's been a while since I posted here. I'm sitting here and going thru the thread and just thought I would post some of my thoughts.
Been following the thread for a while and now have joined the Live Room for a bit of extra help.
Although sometimes the room can get a bit crazy, it is a great help when you follow what Dan, Zak and James talk about.
Since December time I've managed to blow up my live account twice (before mid January). Albeit only small account sizes ($100 deposit on 2 occasions), it hurts.
Jump in here jump in there, 20 trades a day, sell when I should buy. All the worst trades I seemed to be taking.
I'd had it at one stage and walked away for a couple of weeks.
Really critical of myself and wondering if I could ever get my head around this Trading 'game'.
AH! There's the key I thought, from under a palm tree with a tasty brew in my hand. 'IT AIN"T A GAME' !
It's not a Demo Account, so it DOES matter if I profit or not.
Part of my situation, as with all new comers is understanding trading in a wholistic way.
I did have a better than average understanding of the system BUT I didn't have a clue about position Management , Risk/Reward or keepin' the 'Lid on the tin' when I had a profit.
There was always something else to jump into.
See, I found on a demo account, it's all very easy to set yourself up with 100K or 1million and trade 10 lots and make 5, 10, 20K per trade. Whoohooo!!! A lot of fun.
The demo is good for learning the system and getting comfy with the setup, BUT (again) the Demo is no good for responsible Money Management.
Point of the story is...
I started to listen, started to watch what others were/are doing in the Live room.
It's been pointed out here many times about professional traders looking at the risk 1st and newbies looking at the reward 1st.
Makes a whole lot of sense and in turn has started returning positive, encouraging pip averages for for me.
I'm not really thinking about the money any more (for the moment) because I can't earn money if I can't be consistent with pips IN the tin.
Also found it helps to close the terminal window at the bottom so I'm not continuously looking at the $ up/down figure.
Just concentrate on the signals, price action and charts. Close out my trades when the signals, S/R levels, etc tell me to and suprise suprise I am now averaging 65% profitable trades.
Also the losers are generally small in size compared to the winners, so the profit/loss $ ratio is about 80% on the profit side.
Cool...
A journal really helps. Keep details of your trades, time of trades, etc, etc.
and spend some time at the end of the week reviewing them. I am using Excel to track the money/pip side of it and OneNote to track the psychology and paste pics of the chart (both good and bad).
It is frustrating (at times) for newbies in the live room, comments like 'banked half for 100+', 'Closing for 90, 300+ for the day' are sometimes not helpful when you're down 60-70 in the session.
I will say, that it is also an inspiration when other traders are making gains like this with the system.
At least we know that it is possible to make pips and inspires us that little bit more to understand and implement the strategy.
I still quite haven't figured out how I like to trade.
Some days I'm making good pips by simply following the setup to the rule. Last week I was actually quite good on the retracements, sometimes 4hr 1hr is excellent others on the 15min. Not any one still is consistent for me. I do realise now that this will take some time and in the mean time just happy being consistent overall.
The thing is, with everyone on this thread and in the live room, they all bring a little bit of inspiration and a lot of diversity to the table.
Some on oil, some gold, others pullbacks, scalpers, long termers.
All of these types of traders are giving us newbies the oppurtunity to explore further than we'd imagined in a safe(r) environment where there is plenty of guidance and wisdom to be freely shared.
Personally from any learning experience in my life, I know that after practice, study and review I will enter the comfort zone of being a professional trader and will fondly remember the days when I was a newbie with an exploding account!
There are too many people here to thank individually, so to all who have contributed, a BIG BIG thank-you and best wishes.
Regards,
Martin
Ps: Since my explosive days I have been working on a simple journal to keep track of my profit/loss, pips ratios, averages etc
Just thought I'd attach it here if anybody is interested in having a look.
This copy is for Excel 2007. I have to work on a couple of the formulas to make it functional in earlier versions of Excel. Will post when fixed.
Pss: Recently I discovered an error in on of the formulas.
The new Calculation in Cell # H14 on the MONTHLY TOTALS Sheet should be :
=LOOKUP(9.99999999999999E+307,H2:H13)
Just Copy and paste this into the cell and all is good.
If anyone has found other errors, then just email me @:
partymarty007@yahoo.com
and I will fix it and re-post the updated Workbook.
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