Dear diary,

I was reluctant to trade after watching the first 30 minutes of cash market opening. I told you that. In fact , there were setups for Short trade in 15-minute chart of ES and YM. However, TICK was not supporting this action. I am still new to trading with TICK. This morning, most of time, it was moving within +400~-400 range which showed the market was kinda non decisive. According to Carter, this range was also called NOISE.

So, I did not make any trade, my dear diary. Looking at the chart, you might say “hey, why didn’t you trade? you could just exit the trade at the bottom the long tailed candle. That will give you couple of Rs” Well, you are right. Well, it is easy to say these retrospectively.

[Read more…] about Postmortem 28-September-2006

Dear diary,

Ah..another losing day. Though the loss is too small to be mentioned, but I got no reason to feel good. In fact, I would categorize this E-mini Nasdaq trade as impulsive. An inside bar immediately after a big down candle is not an nice Long entry. Though the day was choppy, it was tough to trade, at first place, I should not have taken the trade. [Read more…] about Postmortem 27-September-2006

So often I hear about people unable to execute their stops, and keep the loser, hope to make a come back in a losing trade. Here is a paragraph written by Anthony Robbins in his book Awaken the giant within. I find it useful to explain why trader unable to act on stop loss.

What is this force that is controlling you even now and will continue to do so for the rest of your life? PAIN and PLEASURE! Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.

So often I hear people talk about changes they want to make in their lives. But they can’t get themselves to follow through. They feel frustrated, overwhelmed, even angry with themselves because they know they need to take action, but they can’t get themselves to do it. There is one elementary reason: they keep trying to change their behaviour, which is the effect, instead of dealing with the cause behind it.

Understanding and utilizing the forces of pain and pleasure will allow you once and for all to create the lasting changes and improvements you desire for yourself and those you care about. Failure to understand this force dooms you to a future of living in reaction, like an animal or a machine. Perhaps this sounds like a complete oversimplification, but think about it. Why don’t you do some of the things you know you should do?

After all, What is procrastination? It’s when you know you should do something, but you still don’t do it. Why not? The answer is simple: at some level you believe that taking action in this moment would be more painful than just putting it off. Yet, have you ever had the experience of putting something off for so long that suddenly you felt pressure to just do it, to get it done? What happended? You changed what you linked pain and pleasure to. Suddenly, not taking action became more painful than putting it off.

A man who suffers before it is neccessary, suffers more than is necessary.

Dear diary,

Well, I was chopped out. Market again played some tricks. E-mini Nasdaq took out my stop level and, in fact, went lower than swing low in 15-min chart. The rest of story is the same, it went up.

Scared? No. Frustrated? Well, a little bit. But, this kinda days are really part of business. I went through again the trade, I just have to take the trade, though I ended up with a 1-R loss.

I browsed through few blogs, though they are trading stocks, most of them were chopped out by market as well. (Ok, I am using other’s pain to console myself 🙂 )

Let’s fight another day.

powered by performancing firefox

Dear diary,

Well, the market was making fun of me. Gapped up, went down, flat then up big. Ok, I was wrong this time. [Read more…] about Postmortem 25-September-2006

Dear diary,

What am I doing here? I am indeed having some bad days recently, both my personal life and trading. Both hit me hard , emotionally. Well, that’s not the point of this post.

I was chopped out by E-mini Nasdaq today. And I missed out the trade of Dow mini. The problem here is not the effectiveness of trading strategy (i.e for me, it is dummy trading), it is the sharpness of a trader that counts. I was not paying enough attention to YM (Dow mini).

Dummyspots.com has some good articles on dummy trading and dummy spots illustration. Go and have a look.

So, do the bad results recently prompt me to stop posting my trades on the blog? Not at all. In fact, I found it useful and I will continue doing that for the time being.

If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand little chance of ever getting rich.

Anyway, this should be a light week, and I will be flying to Taiwan next week for a break.

Success truly is the result of good judment. Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment!