02 Feb The proof is in the pudding

It’s been a while since I last uploaded a blog post.  I decid­ed to focus more on the actu­al trad­ing than on upload­ing blog posts. At times it felt like that was the only thing that I was doing. It wasn’t but I feel like trad­ing is more impor­tant than writ­ing in my opin­ion. I enjoy writ­ing but I set out to mas­ter trad­ing. Not writ­ing. With that said, let me give you anoth­er update on where I stand. 

DISCLAIMER

Click here for my dis­claimer. It basi­cal­ly says that I am on my path to becom­ing a trad­er and these are just my opin­ions on how to approach learn­ing to trade. Feel free to check it out and com­ment on it.

Here it goes…

The obsta­cle is the way

A good friend told me about this some time ago and it res­onat­ed big time with me. How­ev­er, me being stub­born, I don’t always lis­ten. Since this is a very per­son­al chal­lenge I write it off as just part of my path. These obsta­cles in trad­ing are rep­re­sent­ed by this voice in my head. This voice tells me what I ‘should’ be doing. For some rea­son it always takes me a while to start lis­ten­ing to it. This time the voice said to ana­lyze the pat­terns in accor­dance with its over­all trend and ‘con­text’. Mean­ing I shouldn’t just look at indi­vid­ual pat­terns on the 1M chart but ana­lyze it in con­junc­tion with big­ger time frames. For this rea­son I have decid­ed to look at the 15M chart for over­all ‘con­text’ of the cur­rent stand­ing of the mar­ket. The 1H chart for its rela­tion to where we stand on a big­ger scale. The 5M chart for entry and exit points. 

Bring­ing it all together

So I spent a long time ana­lyz­ing indi­vid­ual pat­terns. Mean­ing pat­terns on its small­est scale if that makes sense. I had already spent some time on trend­lines, chan­nels, etc. What I am doing now is bring­ing them all togeth­er. When cer­tain pat­terns coin­cide with trend­lines I call these a point-of-inter­est. Because here is the point that some­thing might be hap­pen­ing. That some­thing is then for me to decide. I do this by look­ing at the price action in the form of can­dle­sticks to give me a bet­ter under­stand­ing of which way I think it’s going to go. So at this point I am bring­ing chart pat­terns, trend lines, and can­dle­sticks togeth­er to make an edu­cat­ed deci­sion on tak­ing a trade or not. 

What am I doing wrong?

Trad­ing is not about trad­ing. It is not about the ‘act’ of trad­ing. It is about wait­ing for the best oppor­tu­ni­ty to take a trade. Mean­ing I should be trad­ing every­thing that I have an opin­ion on. This is usu­al­ly where it goes wrong in my trad­ing. When I stick to my plan to only trade in the direc­tion of the over­all trend in con­junc­tion with my oth­er cri­te­ria, I do well. So this is what I should keep focussing on. And that is what I’ll do.

The proof is in the pudding.

The same friend that told me about the obsta­cle is the way told me anoth­er one. “The proof is in the pud­ding”. I got­ta keep remind­ing myself of this every day. I will get the pud­ding and (Trump’s voice) “It’s gonna be the best pud­ding you have ever had”. My goal is to shut my friend up about this damn pud­ding. So watch out for my pud­ding. Yeah talk­ing about you. Less talk­ing. More pud­ding making.