Your questions answered
I am dedicated and have discipline, is that enough to succeed? Also I have problems with exits, it’s not fear or greed it’s just when to exit.
If we look at the first question, the name of the game is definitely discipline. When the Turtle experiment occurred several decades ago only some of the team chosen was able to satisfy the founder’s targets. The rest failed and it was a simple matter of discipline, nothing else.
As cliché as this sounds nowadays, I think we need to make sure we don’t see trading as the fun filled theme park it can sometimes appear to be. If you get the results you want from trading, then you can go spend that money at a fun filled theme park. Trading is just a means to get there and I have never found the act of trading itself exciting, I have always found it boring (as opposed to analyzing which I find quite exciting).
Dedication is very important too, but tell me what path to success doesn’t have the requirement of dedication. We live in a civilization where the big boys don’t want us to succeed, governments don’t want us to succeed, people on the same playing field don’t want us to succeed (tall poppy syndrome) and even our families don’t want us to succeed at fear of having to face the reality that they themselves are failures. Dedication is the only attribute that will get you over the speed humps of trading and past the negativity of those around you.
Exits: Not knowing when to exit means one thing, you don’t have a trading system.
A system does not comprise just of an entry rule, as the money is not made on entry. An entry rule can simply be throwing a dart at a dart board, yet traders don’t do that. A system must have entry, exit and risk management rules as a bare minimum.
If you don’t have an exit rule or strategy, why not?
I’d suggest you need to back test several exits. It seems you may already have an entry rule but you need to test entry rules with some possible exits to see which works best over a period of time.
One of the simplest exit rules used is when whatever got you in, in the first place ceases to exist. This may be a good place to start.
Happy Trading
Dean Whittingham
Pentagonal Trading - Trading Systems
Financial Market Fisherman © 2004 - 2007
