Discipline in Trading and Investing

[Ingot54]

Who is Joe Ross really?

Is it possible that JR is really just another marketer, but dressed in the clothes of an educator?

It's already been noted that someone with 47 years of experience should be well past regurgitating VK Tharp, Mark Douglas, and Brett Steenbarger.

A marketer will of course grasp the coat-tails of innovative thinkers like the above. But a true educator would not bother with re-hashing such material. An educator would already expect his students to have taken this stuff on board, and be moving them on to an application of those principles.

Let me give an example of the process - the process a mentor or yes, a teacher - would have a student follow:

ASSESS
PLAN
IMPLEMENT
EVALUATE
REASSESS

That's for starters. We see none of this stuff from JR - just the time-honoured material that anyone with an old Amstrad and an Internet connection could have come up with.

I find it refreshing to read comments like this though:

Discipline, consistency....

Let's talk about INCONSISTENCY again (I wrote on this in another thread)

If you have read Steenbarger (it is a MUST) you should know that being inconsistent with your trading is a SIGNAL.

Probably you've made rules. Probably you have planned in advance when to enter, where to exit... probably you got a plan in advance.

For example: I'm going to trade XYZ, enter when A happens and exit when B occurs.

And later... you break all the rules and made something different. You were INCONSISTENT. And not once or twice, but... everytime.

Probably you got angry because you read in books that you should follow a plan. You felt bad. Do you know that feeling? I bet you do!!!!

So, tomorrow you'll try again, and this time you'll follow the plan. You swear!!!

GREAT MISTAKE MY FRIEND!!!

If you're being consistently inconsistent, you just have a signal. A powerful signal that is telling you that you are trading in a fashion that doesn't suits your personality. You must change.

Your losses of discipline are intuitive gravitations to your natural trading style. The answer to your problems is not to bindly adhere to your methods an work on discipline, but rather to determine wether those methods are truly the ones to follow.

What we do when we're inconsistent may just reveal what comes naturally to us.

Try to find what comes naturally to you. After that you won't need to be disciplined. Simply you won't want to do the other thing.

As Zmark said "you magically become disciplined"

I like that idea - it has appeal.

And it sits well with the Assess - Plan - Implement - Evaluate - Reassess idea.

Eventually the evolution will be to a method and a style with which you are comfortable and relaxed.

And you know what ... it will be your own.

Sticking to a form of trading that requires traders to bend to broad ideas without examining why rules keep getting disregarded, reminds me of a rat on a treadmill. He works his little tail off, but advances not one millimetre!

Can JR cure that problem with his plagiarised approach?

As for me, I prefer the alternative - that's the thinking trader's way.

Rote discipline does not encourage free thinking and evolution to success. In 5 years, you'll be just as undisciplined without knowing why; just as frustrated; just as unsuccessful; and probably ready to give it all away.

 

[cuotes]

Eventually the evolution will be to a method and a style with which you are comfortable and relaxed.

[..........]

Rote discipline does not encourage free thinking and evolution to success. In 5 years, you'll be just as undisciplined without knowing why; just as frustrated; just as unsuccessful; and probably ready to give it all away.

Absolutely!

I understand that the main underlying idea on Steenbarger's book is exactly to evolve towards a method/style with which you are comfortable and relaxed.

In order to achieve that goal, the only way is testing several styles and keep an eye on not only the results, but your feelings/sensations. How do you feel trading that style/method?

And very good your last comment