Author Archives: robertsweetman

Talent is Overrated

I thought I’d post a review ’cause I’m reading this book at the moment and I’d suggest anyone who is learning to trade should read it. The basic premise is that ‘talent’ is not only over-rated in relation to becoming ridiculously good at something it in fact may not actually exist…

I’m not going to regurgitate examples from the book here (go read it for yourself) but simply state that even genius level performers got there not though some ‘divine spark’ but from deliberate practice and the development of ridiculous levels of domain knowledge.

Students of Chris Lori reading this will understand the point I’m about to make regards exercises/practice.

IF you go about looking at a singular aspect of the market in a structured and logical manner that gives you feedback then you will learn that part of what’s occurring faster and more efficiently.

If you just throw on trades and read books about trading hoping to find some sort of shortcut (and we’ve all been there) you are absolutely not using your time in an efficient manner. You could actually be wasting your time.

The kicker here is what’s called ‘deliberate practice’ and just as the name sounds boring and un-sexy this is what it is and therefore why so few people do it. The number of hours of deliberate practice you do in order to learn a skill are basically what governs your ability in that skill. The sooner you start the better you will be…

So that’s my big lesson for the week/year If you’re trying to learn anything at all then I’d suggest you buy a copy of ‘Talent is Overrated’ by Geoff Colvin

Analysis 140413

2 Replies

Yes indeed – these posts are coming thick and FAST! (not…)

Right… Since it’s impossible to trade or even look at anything during the day I have come up with an alternate stratagem. This also stems from my complete inability to multi-task.

Through the systematic practice of ‘doing a thing’ you get better and at the very least ‘doing the homework’ ahead of the next day then checking my planning against what pans out could be a good thing.

A couple of people I follow have mentioned going into the day with a game plan and while I can’t really watch price live I thought there’d be some benefit in putting my own levels/ideas onto a chart and seeing how they hold up. Today I am pleasantly surprised.

Actually even before I opened a EURUSD chart I went over to Forex Factory’s trusty calendar and went through last week’s data to compare the Eurozone data results with the good ‘ole US of A’s. I wanted to get a ‘sense’ of positive or negative between the two contenders before looking at a chart. My conclusion was that as a whole the euro area data had been un-inspiring or at least not positive. Depending on the weighting US data seemed positive/ok.

One clear point looking ahead was that the euro’s chief wind-piece Draghi is talking tomorrow (Tuesday) and looking on an H1 chart we’ve been sideways following an up-swing.

So… potentially more sideways, maybe it’ll turn into a pennant but a raging attack on 1.3200 seems somewhat unlikely unless someone/something drives it up. Then I had a look on an hourly chart and marked it up thusly… (is that a word?) so this is my ‘before’ picture.

I’ll not bore you to tears about it but 1.3066 was what I wrote on the chart Sunday nite and it seems to have been a key point all day.

I put in the European open, US open and EU closes in as verticals below since this helps me get an idea of the passage of time across different chart timeframes.

What’s pretty clear is the selling all through the US session and then withdrawal of bids just now so we’re back at the low of the range from early/mid last week of 1.3040 – Is everyone selling euro’s to meet their margin calls in Gold? Who knows

I guess we could see Asia take it sideways and then back up to 1.3066 again before breaking back down but I’ve not looked at this in any detail and I’m not staying up to watch either…

As they said in ‘Stingray’… “Anything can happen in the next half hour!” G’nite!

Trade 240213

6 Replies

Yes, it’s been more than a month since I placed any trades = FACT!

In some ways this serves to make the point from the earlier (much earlier) video post that I’ve not got a great deal of time in which to actually trade and this blog will only detail trades I’ve made.

If I’m to trade with any confidence I like to have developed some ‘connection‘ to the market and this is ridiculously difficult if you’re actually working 50+ hours per week in a completely non-trading related job.

However on Sunday the ‘DOWNGRADE’ (cue dramatic music) of the UK was able to penetrate even my tired brain so along with the rest of the FX community I wondered what would happen to the good ‘ole pound on Sunday at 22:00. We were not disappointed.

So on this basis I was looking to go long for the close of the gap which is basically a play on the liquidity available in a given direction following a sharp spike down. Booyah!

So I got in just above the lower red line and the upper line was nominally my target.

The eagle eyed among you will note that I closed everything about half way between the two points but I’ll come back to that at the end of this post in what will be famously known as NOTE 1

Here’s a slightly more interesting view with annotation from an M1 chart

Now this is all well and good but at the same time I also made an error… Due to having the attention span of a drunk monkey with ADHD I saw something on twitter about a huge gap up in USDJPY which got me all excited. Rather than having a trade idea (as I did with GBP) all I had here was optimism and spangles. What I also managed to do was put my fat monkey finger on the ‘at market’ button while messing with stops/limit settings.

I ended up with this…

There are so many reasons why this was a bad idea that I can’t list them all here… apart from the fact that my clumsiness got me into it in the first place. I could have had a bit more subjectivity and moved my stops then been ‘saved’ later in the morning but after grinding this out for an hour I felt that discretion was the better part of valour.

What I have rather grandly referred to as Note 1 goes as follows…

NOTE 1

Retail traders with very small accounts (of which I most definitely am one) are overwhelmingly disadvantaged by the ridiculously awful psychology associated with having no goddamn money.

There, I’ve said it out loud.

Let’s combine this fact with the other monstrous problem which is that new traders lose. You don’t know what you’re doing and are compromised (massively) by the fact that the money you have is actually important on a relative basis.

Is this anywhere near optimal? No it’s not.

To butcher a quote ‘we hold these truths to be self evident’ so the solution (having looked squarely at the problem) is to change things which means another mad work day tomorrow.

Cheers for sticking with me on this people. I’m still having fun and maybe I’m actually improving.

Trade 040113

11 Replies

Ah and so to new beginnings… and I’m going to clear this point up right now before anyone reads any further. Post-trade analysis is always 20-20

Which means it’s challenging to put yourself back in the moment when you placed the trade. It’s inevitable that there might well be a lot of ‘coulda/woulda/shoulda’ in these types of posts so I’m open to suggestions as to how to improve them. Comments purely along the lines of ‘that was a shit trade’ are only welcome if you can point me to your blog/analysis/audited trading results.

The intention here is for me to objectively look at what I did so I can wring all the lessons from each experience. If you feel compelled to point out a bunch of mistakes then I’m going to insist you’re not a dick about it. That was a ‘Be Nice‘ warning on behalf of the ‘Feeling Slightly Vulnerable Here’ party. Thanks for your polite consideration.

I’ve started writing this up and have also begun to realise what an awful lot of work I might have let myself in for but lets press on regardless shall we? Need a brew first though!

Trade Thesis – EURUSD

Essentially although there’s been an equity rally the euro has just not gone anywhere the last few days so I’m looking at places to get short. Based on previous observations there’s usually a reaction when price gets back to the days range pre-europe open about 06:00-07:00. in this case that’s around 1.0342 for a short.

So the NFP number came out and it was near as dammit on expectation so there was a steady hitch up to that number. It sat in/around 1.0340 for 10 minutes without getting above 1.03048 so I did get short at 1.03042 as per my plan. Bonus points for sticking to the plan but many negative marks for not being patient enough to wait longer. If I had waited and stepped back from the trade a little things would have been much better.

My rationale for this trade was invalidated by the ‘non-miss’ nature of the unemployment number. The price behavior usually seen at this point was overcome by a larger part of the market seeing am opportunity to buy and I’d avoided an opportunity to look at the bigger picture – which I’ll get onto later. Other participants reading the situation differently meant I was going entirely in the wrong direction at this point.

Couple of execution issues also didn’t help. Firstly put my stop much, much too close to the action i.e. within the previous dealing range rather than outside it… This should have been above two dealing ranges (1.3071?) to give me some protection and I wouldn’t have gotten stopped out.

See the two boxes to the left in this screenshot to really see what I’m talking about.

So with all that in mind here’s the real error from this trade. Let’s remember the retro-active analysis challenge of this type of thinking but the next screenshot is what I had put up yesterday evening when I was looking before all this happened. The box with the red line and the arrow in it was where I was expecting price to get back to before falling further…

Quite… I’d basically drawn in a line where price goes right back to 1.3090 area which is exactly what it did do this evening. I got suckered into only looking at a very, very small extract of what was happening and entirely forgot the bigger picture. All I was focused on (unfortunately) was the price in Asia pre-market and the sell off without reference to the higher time-frame.

[Hindsight warning] I should have been buying at 1.3034′s and I’d have had a defined take profit already in play. With some further thought I guess I could well have avoided this but I’m only just coming back to look at everything now rather. Still it was an interesting exercise.

The last screenshot is something I’ve just noticed while writing this which is that when the payrolls number was announced a clear trendline break occurred. Having focused only on the price from this morning without the larger context I made the wrong directional call.

There you go.

New direction for 2013

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Hi guys and gals it’s 2013 so well done for surviving the Mayan apocalypse

I wanted to say thanks and outline what’s happening with this blog/platform going into the next year

I’ll put an example post up from last month so you can see where this is going trade-wise

Another post will go up with ‘people I really rate’ in FX/trading and so on but really it’s gonna all be about the trades and posting those to the exclusion of pretty much everything else

Best wishes for 2013 – Rob

The next big web thing and how it relates to trading…

6 Replies

Do you know what the next ‘big’ thing will be on the web? It’s busy happening now.

Formerly, if you weren’t a programmer and you wanted to combine information to show something new then you needed to spend a stack of money developing something…

However this gap between coding knowledge and creativity is closing. As long as you have the idea you will soon be able to create it. Someone else will provide the glue – all you will need to do is have the idea to stick it together. Go look at www.ifttt.com for a great example of this.

Let’s take a commonly known portal like Stocktwits who have just released an API. What this means is that you can trigger events off of things happening – what about trades? Let’s say you want to see the consensus view on EURUSD and you’re aware that often the consensus is wrong so you are interested in taking the opposite position.

I’ve spent some time reading the EURUSD stream on Stocktwits and have been very surprised to see what people are doing i.e. maybe I’m not so terrible after all – can I somehow use this insight into the behavior of others? Why not? I’m sure you smart people out there can extrapolate from here.

During a webinar a couple of months ago the presenter called for an app that only showed what ‘crappy’ traders are thinking/doing. They were/are using this as another information source since if there’s a lot of noise about a certain play it may mean they have less inclination to actually trade it. The herd is usually wrong so avoid the herd, right? Smart or what?

So eventually I stumbled across a mobile building app thing called Infinite Monkeys.

What I’ve done is taken the feeds of a number of twitter people who have consistently shown their ability to call false breaks (i.e they post positions that actually become turning points) and collected them together in one single app which I can watch on my phone.

Do you know of any particular names/traders on twitter who deserve a place on this platform? Please comment so I can add them!

All contributors will be able to download the app for free or just subscribe or something. It just took the idea and some small amount of time. It wasn’t difficult. At all. Really – it took me 10 minutes, I’m not posting about this to sell/promote an app but I did it to re-enforce the following point. Go make your own even!

This type of ‘mash-up’ has been happening in the creative sphere since I was a kid – yes, I remember when sampling was new and the internet only came in green.

Now the same revolution is coming to data. Every business critical system we use at work is driven by a database – whether it’s on a server or on ‘the cloud’. The people who can use, run, interrogate and leverage the data at my place of work are the ones that run everything or are making steady career progress.

This might be Salesforce where you are or some other tool whether it’s for CRM, production or stock management. You may be a hell of a nice guy but the guy who can look at the data and answer the question intelligently without having to first guess is soon going to be your boss…

So the data is coming. Your intelligent analysis, your ability to use/filter and slice this information will become increasingly central to your success.

We are not knowledge workers anymore – if you want knowledge you can Google it
- When programmers get stuck that’s the first place they look!
Platforms are evolving to a point where all the data will soon be accessible

All those pop-psych books like ‘Freakanomics’ (so many of them) or the genius of Steve Jobs (people will pay a premium for an elegant PC that just works) come down to insight and finding the truth that others can’t see.

Unless you’re a niche, niche, niche specialist you’re now (pretty much) a commodity

Knowledge was power

Insight is now power

Blog update for November

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Well that’s just super… WordPress ate my blog so this is a re-type… hence it’s going to seem curt, short and to the point. I can’t remember the jokes from the first version either but take it from me they were hilarious

It’s been two months since my last post and I’ve pretty much taken my brain out of the whole ‘trading’ subject. Ok, that’s a lie. What I’ve been doing is attempting to re-frame how I think about the sharp end of this topic which is placing and managing trades. This has resulted in me realising a few things about the contents of my own brain which I’ll go into.

Developing non-attachment

Really what this comes down to is that I’m too attached to the outcome associated with an action.

This is supremely ironic because in my day job (project manager) I’m very much at home with making decisions and proposing a course of action. Where I think this falls over in trading is that I’m way too attached to the outcome…

‘Attachment is the origin, the root of suffering; hence it is the cause of suffering.’

In my meditation practice being attached to the outcome of a situation means that you fail to see it clearly. That filter of attachment introduces fear, doubt and uncertainty which makes for sh**y trading decisions. Getting in too early and then getting out too early are big ones for me.

So I’ve spent a lot of time re-framing how I perceive myself when trading. In fact what I’m attempting to do is develop what’s called ‘witnessing consciousness’ which is the dispassionate observation of the ‘chatter’ in your own mind. This isn’t trading without emotion, this is avoiding being triggered by emotions that do arise – think of this as being able to look at yourself doing something from the outside.

This leaves room for intuition/fear/emotion etc. but it means that you’re looking to create a ‘gap’ between feeling and action which is based on trading experience and reason. It’s an attempt to short circuit your screaming monkey brain which is trying to throw pooh at the monitor

Being here now…

I have consistently attempted to push my life forwards and then gotten incredibly frustrated when it’s failed to move at the speed I’d like. I’ve recently realised what a waste of energy this is and my disappearance two months ago was really the result of me throwing my toys out of the pram to go and sulk…

There is no good time to start anything new. Waiting for the perfect moment or opportunity to start doing something is preventing you from starting. The trick is simply to start because inevitably you’ll get there a lot sooner because whatever it is that you want to do will probably take you longer than you think anyway… so just start.

If I’d have waited till I knew everything about exercise and nutrition before starting to go to the gym I’d be in even worse shape now if I’d never have started. As it is – seven years later – I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been and I still don’t really know as much as I’d like about what works or doesn’t work for me. A couple of things I’ve tried recently have paid off but again, this is seven years after I began by puking up trying to run round the local park.

Probably because it’s more cerebral and not physical I’ve delayed really starting to get my head around trading till fairly recently – I have been waiting for perfection when it’s clear that may only be reachable in a few more years. The learning isn’t in the learning, it’s in the doing.

So there needs to be a lot more doing.

Forget about the future

I have literally no idea what my life will look like with respect to trading two years from now. What I do know is that thinking/planning/worrying or being concerned about it now is a complete and utter waste of time and effort.

The thing to focus on is the trade I will place tomorrow, then the one after that, then the next one.

In a number of years (as with going to the gym) I will be able to think back to this point and think ‘Aha! look how far I’ve come’. Being overly concerned with the end goal now is a total waste of time and inhibits my freedom of action/movement.

These three things are the same thing

Fear. Fear of making a mistake whether it is with regards to trading or any other topic. Having some idea that I’m able to get to a point of understanding or ‘completion’ in trading/life is essentially an illusion. As with all things you have to engage in experiences and then learn along the way as part of an iterative process. Had I had less fear/concern about the future I’d have got laid a whole lot more by now too…

In my work life I’ve pretty much had enough of these that I know what works. In going to the gym all this time I’m finally getting there where I know what works for me nutritionally. In trading this comes down to knowing way more theory than learning from real experiences.

So the way forwards is to practice non-attachment, to be unconcerned with the distant future and place one foot in front of the other. Then one day I’ll look up and find I’m at the top of the mountain.

Thanks for all the comments / encouragement over the last few weeks. There will be a number of blogs coming out in the next week with stuff I’ve stumbled over as well as some decent trades too so stay tuned and thanks for your patience.

Off the reservation and self preservation

32 Replies

Right up-front, before anyone else makes this comment I’m going to make it for them.

I am currently failing to learn this skill

Now this isn’t in some sort of ‘oh, woe is me’ post because I’m just not like that – oh no.

This is a statement of fact based on a recent trade where I went completely off the reservation. Friday I got involved in a trade with the following characteristics: -

It wasn’t my idea
It was in a pair I’ve not previously looked at
It was against the prevailing market mood
My entry point didn’t follow any setup at all
It was on a timeframe I’ve not traded in before

While this experience wasn’t particularly damaging financially it did lead me to question whether (after all this time) I have any business putting real money into trades when I am still pulling this sort of suicidal crap.

After much soul searching (well 20 minutes) I’ve pulled my live account and will be trading on demo till Feb. So that’s four months to get my proverbial s**t together and prove to myself I can build a rising equity curve over time.

BEFORE anyone chimes in with the ‘demo account is not like real trading’ bleh, bleh, merh meh me noises… I know this. However I’d suggest that if you (or one if you’re pretending to be HRH) can’t do this off a demo system then there is literally no way on earth you can trade successfully with real cash.

I appreciate this isn’t exciting or interesting for people reading (sorry) but as I pointed out this trade was a universe away from everything I know that works…

Reading books, knowing setups and all that is valuable but they’re nothing without proper execution… and my execution really, really does suck.

So back to the drawing board, back to school, back to backtesting and back to demo. The upshot of this may be that my posting rate drops off a cliff but it was already pretty minimal. However, in this context going backwards may actually mean going forwards in the long run.

Let’s make it so ’cause now I’m just plain pissed off.

Miss-directed rebellion

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In the last few weeks I’ve kind of been ‘on a break’ from looking at making trades because I’ve realised there are some psychological bits and pieces that I need to sort out. (ok, ok, some huge dirty great rocks)

On the plus side I actually (now) have the means to get inside my own head and root about for answers. As I wrote here I started meditating regularly well over a year ago now.

The fact that trading prompted me to even start doing this means, even if it ends up nowhere, meditating has really changed my life so I’ve not wasted my time. This isn’t the right post to get into the muck and bullets of that statement so back to the first paragraph…

It’s clear to me that through all the stuff I’ve learned about the technical part of trading there isn’t really any more to cram into my brain. Where I am now on this is all about application and probably has been for at least the last three months. I can keep ‘information gathering’ but that’s really all it will be in the vast majority of cases.

So we get onto the super duper part of application. Applying the knowledge I have in the market. Exciting, right?! Hmmmm… not so much. In fact I have discovered a number of challenges.

I absolutely cannot get out of bed in the morning
I have a lot less ‘self-discipline’ than I thought
Definitely under capitalised due to my life circumstances

Point number 3 is something I’m working on (hey, work – gettit?) but I’m going to have to come back to that one elsewhere. However points 1 and 2 have definitely been the source of endless frustration. Being generally pissed off at yourself for something that you can’t seem to overcome despite a lot of ‘good intentions’ is not healthy.

So eventually after a lot of sitting (i.e. meditating) and when this quote hit me in the face from somewhere I figured it out. First the quote: -

habits – you make them and then they make you

What I figured out is that from a quite young age I’ve been in the habit of rebellion. Now this doesn’t mean I’m some sort of anarchist it just means that early on (as a teenager) for a number of reasons I had to define my own identity and in part was only able to really do this by a certain degree of non-conformity. This could also be described as ‘f**king things up’

Now where this really becomes a problem is that ‘rebellious voice’ may have served me for a time as a teenager but I’ve let it stick around and it’s significant influence has become something of a habit.

Doing stuff for yourself and that ‘I’ll show them’ approach may work to solidify a sense of self when you’re 16-24 but it’s now quite counter productive.

What I’ve come to realise is this part of my inner world stopped rebelling against ‘others’ (or my parents) a long time ago and then took it upon itself to rebel against my own desires, wishes and intentions.

Read that last bit again. As soon as I became functionally independent that part of me decided it’s ‘job’ was to rebel against what I’m looking to do!!

Now clearly this part of me didn’t want to die so it had to be very clever and keep very well hidden so I have made progress it’s just maybe not with the speed and precision I could have.

It’s job is to rebel, to pull in the other direction. If I want to go left it wants to go right. If I want to improve my diet it’s busy convincing me that it’s ok to eat chocolate in the morning with my coffee (loaded with sugar).

Now the strategy might be to apply more self discipline. I can tell you now this doesn’t work and it’s tiring as hell. Why fight, fight, fight with a part of your own mental landscape? It’s just too hard and I’m smarter than that.

So what have I done? I have re-tasked this part of my rebellious self away from being an internal ‘blocker’ or guardian to have an external focus.

This is how it works. My higher self want’s to go to the gym. Rebellious me doesn’t want to and starts coming up with all sorts of reasons and justifications not to. Here’s the conversation…

Me: Right, time to go to the gym

Reb: No I’m tired, why not coffee rather? Do it tomorrow etc. etc.

Me: Hi Reb, you know this isn’t your job anymore right?

Reb: What?! How did you notice me?

Me: I’m aware of you now – you’re job is now to look out for external stuff ’cause you’ve grown up. You’re built to push back on stuff out there not ideas from within

Reb: Awww, but it’s harder!

Me: Yes but let’s go to the gym and I’m sure you’ll get the chance to do something later.

Reb: OK, but give me an example so I know what to look out for.

Me: Ok, like someone trying to take advantage or use emotional blackmail or manipulate you (us)

Reb: Right, external stuff as we discussed!

Me: Absolutely partner.

I get to go to the gym and don’t carry a stack of crap around associated with not going the gym/eating cake. Since I figured this out (last week) it’s actually been pretty cool seeing this in action although of course this new habit of correctly focussed rebellion isn’t bedded in 100% yet.

Sometimes it’s not more positive pressure that’s required but less negative influence – maybe from an area that’s hard to accept.

Who knew I was still such a rebel? I didn’t

Why is learning to trade so hard?

11 Replies

This post is driven by the following question…

Why is learning to trade so hard?

Pulling together a couple of threads here I hope to add to the discussion and suggest an answer. I’d be interested to hear people’s feedback since it’s a pretty significant question for anyone starting out on this path.

If you’ve not had the opportunity to read it I’d suggest you get hold of a book by Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman called ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. The observant will notice there’s an important apostrophe in that sentence.

For a trader this covers some very, very useful topic like heuristics and biases, the endowment effect, formulas versus intuition and so on.

You know all those ‘pop-psych’ books you’ve read on the tube? Their underlying research may well have derived from this guy and his research partner Amos Tversky (now deceased) who carried out most of the original experiments over the last 40 years.

In the book Daniel explains two modes of thinking with their own strengths, weaknesses and characteristics.

FAST

This is automatic thinking which operates at a instinctual level with little sense of voluntary control. This could include involuntary reaction to expressions, automatically filling in missing words from songs and turning to find the source of a car back-firing.

SLOW

These are effortful mental activities that demand concentration. Maths, decision making and choices. Trying to remember something or drawing conclusions from complex data… you can see where this is going.

Now the question that I asked earlier is also linked to a second question which really should follow on…

Why is trying to teach other traders so ‘hit and miss’?

If you want to learn anything in life then you find a teacher. This has been the way of the world since man invented fire. So part of the learning to trade ‘journey’ if you will is finding a system, suite of tools or approach that (as many have written) matches your personality… You can spend a long time looking for this.

Now, if there was just one way to trade that would be great – we’d all be done and there would also be one way to teach others how to trade. This is so far from reality that I’ve just seen a squadron of pigs fly past the window.

What are traders teaching non-traders mostly? They’re teaching them setups. If the blah, blah, blah and the x, y, z then it’s time to etc…

What they’re trying (and mostly failing) to do is present a myriad of complex information in SLOW thinking terms because these types of terms can actually be communicated. No wonder learning to trade is so damn hard and teaching people to trade is (maybe) even harder. I’d guess more than half the info is missing!

By the time a trader has actually gotten good (i.e. looked at a f**k load of charts) they’re not operating from this perspective at all. They’re approaching trading from the perspective of FAST - to them it’s all intuitive.

They’ll get asked ‘this trade met all your (setup) criteria but you didn’t trade it… why?’ and I’ve heard examples of this that the best answer given in reply has really been nothing more than ‘it doesn’t look right’.

Yes, you still need rules to avoid doing something really dumb but this still doesn’t bridge the gap between what’s taught and it’s implementation by someone else.

You and me are looking at the world of the market represented as a bunch of charts using our ‘slow’ brain. The guy trading successfully and consistently is looking at exactly the same data with his/her ‘fast’ brain.

This is the difference between pushing a wheelie bin versus piloting the space shuttle. How can the guy in the shuttle explain to the wheelie bin dude what flying looks like? There’s an in-built information chasm here.

So what to do… These are definitely two things I think all newbie traders like me need to accept.

1) It’s just gonna take time. If you’re not able to trade full time (addressing myself here) then it’s gonna take more time than someone who can watch price for 8 hours a day. Week in and week out. Look at charts. Look at more charts. Really deeply and seriously look at charts.

2) Record keeping. Keep records of your trades, your emotions, what the market was doing in general and how you managed a trade. Put as much detail into recording what you did as you can and really investigate all your losers. Really, really investigate your winners.

Case in point is this bunch of tweets from @Trader_Dante on the Twitter losing it about people not keeping records and how it can help or hurt them.

This is cut from TweetDeck so you need to read from the bottom up.

Follow Tom on Twitter @Trader_Dante or visit his site here if you’re interested. I borrowed this as it illustrated a point so emailed Tom for permission to re-post it.

If you don’t keep records then surely, surely there’s no way you can progress other than by accident. No-one accidentally finds themselves piloting a space shuttle. Wheelie bins go out on Thursday nite all down my road though so doing that seems pretty simple.

So there’s my answer. Whatever system is being taught the person teaching it has access to a set of ‘cues from the market that they couldn’t give to you even if their life depended on it.

Record and examine your own trading excursions
Look at a lot of charts – figure out your own ‘cues

Whether or not this progress from ‘slow’ to ‘fast’ encompasses trading psychology is another debate but I think it does. Once the engagement with the market is that unconscious and seamless then I can’t see how negative psychology could interfere with the execution. This is where the oft quoted statistic of 10,000 hours to mastery may well come in.

If anyone else has further insights into how to cross the chasm from ‘slow’ to ‘fast’ thinking I’d love to hear them.

robertsweetman

from Persistent to Consistent

Author Archives: robertsweetman

Talent is Overrated

Analysis 140413

Trade 240213

Trade 040113

New direction for 2013

The next big web thing and how it relates to trading…