Nigel first of all......THANKS for your kind help to all
your strategy has helped immensely in my trading approach...
Delighted to hear that foodaba. I remember reading somewhere that it's like all traders almost have to go through a challenging period of time where they are figuring out their path. They might try a lot of different approaches and become frustrated along the way. But unbeknownst to them, they are learning a little bit more with each attempt and eventually, through hard work and persistence, they begin to see progress and the fruits of their effort start to develop.
When you think about it, it makes sense, because it's similar in almost all jobs/professions. The young potential star footballer still has to clean the senior team players' boots. The apprentice lawyer, who is already educated to a very high level, will still spend the first couple of years in their career photocopying, filing and doing other mundane tasks. The junior doctor works 100 hour weeks. The apprentice plumber will go to the shop to get the sausage rolls and make the tea. The junior banker will work all night and all weekend. Against that backdrop, it's not surprising that newbie traders often have to go through a bit of hard graft to earn their stripes.
It's most likely that a lot of the people who have read the
PAST Strategy Ebook will give it a go for a while and then move on to something else. But as long as they have picked up something of use to their trading as they have read it, that's good enough for me. I would have my own ideals as to what most people will hopefully take away from it, but in the end, people will remember what they want to remember.
1 quick question, do you move your stops as the trade progresses or
once you get to BE sit on your hands or go watch the teleee
Good question foodbaba. I see it as my job to enter the market controlling my risk as tightly as possible, and then getting that risk off the table completely by bringing my stop to breakeven. Once I have done that, I have no power over what the market is going to do. It will either "pay out", and move into profit for me, or it will hit my stop. There's nothing I can do that is going to influence what is going to happen, so to say I go and watch the teleeeeee mightn't be too far off the mark!
In terms of trailing stops, I generally don't bother. I just check it every once and a while. There is an interesting observation that can be made here though in relation to trailing stops. One of the arguments you often hear from people is that they like to give a trade "room to breathe", i.e. they seem to be quite happy to allow a trade to move relatively far into losing territory before eventually, they hope, moving into profit.
But as soon as that trade does move into profit, those same people very quickly change their focus from breathing room to trailing tight stops or "protecting profit". Hang on a second, what happened to the "room to breathe" argument? The breathing room is very quickly cut off once the trade is showing a profit
I prefer to do the opposite. I do not tolerate any excess breathing room for a trade when it is playing with my money. That is to say, if I stand to incur an expense for this breathing room in the form of a loss to my account, errrr... no thanks. I will only allow the absolute minimum amount of air to stay alive. If, after the market has decided that the trade is to move into profit and I have my risk off the table, well the trade can have all of the breathing room it wants. As long as it's with the market's money, not on my tab! Nosireeeee!
Hope that helps.
