Hey Guy's,
Just wondering what techniques T2W traders use to overcome breaking their rules/ trading plan.
Any psychological tricks? or perhaps a certain routine when you feel emotions taking over?
Please no reply's like "just stick to your rules". This is obvious.. but not very easy.
Cheers
JWG
It's a very complex subject.
I have been developing this theory that we deceive ourselves and only notice we're "breaking" our rules when breaking them causes a loss, whereas instead we're breaking them all the time, even when we win. So far it's clear, but there are details and implications that I don't fully understand.
Something else that needs to be said is that, in "discretionary trading", rules are flexible (or else it wouldn't be called
discretionary trading), as opposed to automated trading, where they are fixed and univocal. So it actually makes sense that we interpret our rules (according to our
discretion). As a consequence, when we lose, it's not because we "broke" a rule, but because it wasn't the right time to "break" it. But it's not even correct to speak of "rules", because as I said in discretionary trading there aren't univocal rules, but only general principles. But then even this is not true - I'll talk about it later. However in general it is true, because discretionary trading is very close to the concepts of "instinct", "intuition"... and we make money because of that, and not because we're following rules. If we were making money because we blindly followed univocal rules, then we should automate everything, and shouldn't be doing anything at all.
As a summary of everything I said above, the problem is not our lack of discipline (it doesn't make sense to follow rules if we don't know them to always work), but our lack of knowledge of the markets (we don't understand enough about them to always win, or even just to be profitable).
And, I know it's not related to the topic, but let me add that our understanding of the markets will very hardly increase, because it's hard to elaborate in your own head all the statistics that you have seen in your trading career and evaluate where the right stoploss should be and so on. So the way to go in my opinion is automated trading. Because the most you can understand about the markets is that by instinct you (99% of traders, including me) cannot figure them out. What you can do is back-test and find a system that works. Yes, systems can figure out the market. And if you applied such systems you would be profitable by trading manually (but not "discretionary"). On top of it, it will be very hard in terms of patience and attention for a human to apply a trading system. Then there are those traders that have figured out the market and are profitable with discretionary trading, but they are a very small minority, and I don't know anything about them or how they do it.
Oh, another thing. Also, if you set any fixed rules as a discretionary trader, you have to be careful what rules you set, because some may stop your gambling addiction but others may stop your trader intuition, and those will be the rules you will be wanting to break the most (but you will not know if it's the gambler or the rational trader in you trying to make you break them). So if you do have fixed rules, after all, this may be the answer to your question about why you are "breaking" your rules. You're not sure if they work (breaking them before has brought you profits). And it will be hard to find out if they work, because that's the way it is with discretionary trading (you can't back-test, and you don't even know/remember which rules you followed and worked in the past, in your whole trading career). And if you knew exactly what rules worked, then it would make sense to automate everything.
Sorry if I couldn't synthesize well enough, and not explain clearly enough, but I definitely spoke of the main ideas I have on the subject, even if in random order.