dbphoenix said:
And if this is, for you, to be the correct way to be thinking, great, as long as you're trading your own money and no one else's. However, adopting "expectancy" solely because some other trader who happens to be successful uses expectancy of some sort is not necessarily adequate justification for the course of action you've described. And to insist on the one hand that you have an open mind while stating that you have no faith in backtesting and that what you call "hypothetical testing" is worth "piddly p**s" suggests a certain inconsistency that may explain why you're searching for the "correct" way to think and why you have trouble understanding Douglas.
You say you have a plan, and, in a broad sense, you do. But you don't have a consistently profitable trading strategy. The course you have plotted for yourself is not much different from those which most of the people posting in the journals forum are following: try this, try that, all in real time, all with real money, see what happens. This is not the course plotted by someone seeking to become a consistently profitable trader, much less a professional one; it's the course plotted by someone who craves the action and cannot wait to get to it. Your "plan" may as well consist of wearing mismatched socks during the trading day.
What Grey1 does and what Grey1 accomplishes is completely irrelevant unless he tells you exactly what he does and when he does it and how he does it and you follow all of that to the letter, exactly, what and when and how. You can then expect to achieve exactly the same result that he does. In the real world, however, this isn't going to work for you.
So many beginners base their approaches on what they've read and what of that sounds good, e.g., you can be a profitable trader with only a 50% win:lose ratio, or even 30%. And, theoretically, yes, this is true. But in terms of real trading in the real world, it is crap. But the trader who needs the action overlooks this and drives ahead, regardless.
Db
I do not agree - of course - but I will tell you why.
I have spent a good deal of time trading live - to be exact 3 months papertrading and 6 months fulltime. During that time, and following reflection on what I done, my main conclusion was the majority of what I tried to learn was all crap.
It was only in the latter stages of my training - last 3 months - that I began to see results - and all were based on my own work and ideas, not on what I had tried to learn from someone else.
Without talking too much about ME, I fully understand why one needs a plan. I would not have been able to trade stocks successfully - even though the profits wre small due to cash availability - I was able to prove to myself that I had a strategy that worked.
Now the crap bit - what I discovered, for me, was that most TA signals were of now real value, in that one minute they worked, and the next they did not. So they were banished from my screens - apart from one little Slow Stochs, that was used on 1 min candle to remind me that the lows/ highs are losing momentum.
What it boiled down to was, have I got the b*ll* to take on the risk in order to get the gains. I eventually did it, and just fired em off when I saw the signal, and got out if I was wrong. It was not long until I got my average 50/50, some days 80/20m 60/40, 40/60, etc, and that was it. I was now a trader - but I forgot to mention that I had spent all of my money during that year on living expenses.
So, now, where am I. As the saying goes, once bitten, twice shy.
i will never walk away from good money again, hence I am still working on contract , but when the time comes that the contract work is slowing up, I will return to my daytrading (which is all set to go) right away.
In the meantime, I plan to explore some new avenues in trading, which I am giving some insight into here.
So, as I said before, one needs to read between the lines to see what a person really writes.
And for what it is worth at this stage, maybe not much to some, I am reading that Socrates, and a few others, really know what they are doing.
Will they tell us their Expectancy figure, well, the only way to find out is to ask!
By the way, this is not an ego trip, been there and done that, I take this very serious. I told you my history as you rightly say, some traders are influenced by what they read. I do not want people thinking that I have no experience in the markets, when in fact, I have a good deal of experience for one particular type of trading - namely daytrading Nasdaq Tech stocks.
Oh, just because my experiences with learning from someone else were bad, does in no way mean that it will be the same for someone else.
One handy way to know if the person, or persons, with whom you are going to converse with will really be of any great assistance to you, id to ask them that one simple question.
Q: What is your System Expectancy
By now, the value of same should be apparent.
If the answer is not forthcoming, then I would see little red lights flashing in my head. This one question reveals all - no fancy statements for lat monh, fancy charts and "indicators", no, just one simple answer please.
And like our politicians do, only in reverse - keep repeating the question until it is answered
😆
Regards,
