Wednesday 4 January 2012

Three Ways of Trading

It's my number "3" again.


Whether you want to be CP in Discretionary, Hybrid or Fully Auto trading, there are challenges and achievements. However, the challenges and achievements are different in each case and a trader should, IMO, choose which road to go down on the basis of his own DNA, financial considerations and expertise.


Whichever you want to do, takes time to learn, just like going to university for any other profession. Doctors can take 10 years to get the needed skills. There is the famous 10,000 hours concept of achieving mastery.


Certainly, learning to do all this by myself did take at least 10,000 hours for mastery as a discretionary trader.


However, there are shorter roads. Specialization!


As a discretionary trader, one can find a single trading picture and gain mastery over that one particular setup. If mastery takes X amounts of time, specializing could take as little as 1/10th X.


If you become a hybrid trader and automate your entries then the time could be less, say, 1/20th X.


Going fully auto could reduce the time to, say, 1/35th X.


Of course the starting point for all of this is learning the basics of trading. I'll go deeper into each in the days to come.


The Euro was the flavour of the day. I had a little later start as I'm still sore from skiing over the holidays. Kiki was here and the daughter of a friend of Mrs EL and we had great weather and skiing. I'm about 20 minutes from a great ski area with miles of pistes.


Back to the Euro, all I had to do was pick my sell spots. It never looked like changing trend. And watching the trend is what it's all about.



2 comments:

  1. Hi EL,
    Wanted to take a moment and thank you for all of the information within the blog. I started reading the blog about a month ago and have spent a great deal of time rereading past posts and have been able to reverse engineer a couple of setups that I have been using on the Euro and occasionally the ES. I have been SIM trading and have attained CP every day for the past ten trading days. I typically trade a 2 lot and a 1 lot on trades that I am not as comfortable with. I trade all in and all out at a 5 tick target and am currently experiencing a 69% win rate. I usually cut and run when the trade is not going my way and avoid getting stopped out. I will continue to SIM trade for awhile until the trades feel automatic. I am posting this in hopes that it may encourage others as well as to thank you.

    Nick

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great stuff Nick. Just take your time and don't go live too soon. That "muscle memory" conditioning is very important. You need a lot of good experiences to steel you against what's to come.

    ReplyDelete