Week 8 Performance
January 28, 2006 by Trader Rich
What a week. I lost $1782 and 214 pips. That calculates to a 12% loss of capital this week.
I decided after losing 214 pips last Sunday evening to take some time off to try to study price action. But even as I watched the charts and traded a demo account, I lost big. I just couldn’t pick anything right this week. Everything I tried that had worked for me in the past at least half the time failed.
I’d be really interested to know how everyone else fared this week. Please send your comments.
I’m a bit discouraged because I really felt totally out of sync with the market this week. I’ll give it a go again on Monday and hope that things turn out better. By no means am I giving up but the more I do this, the more I realize how difficult it is.
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Well for my first week I certainly had a bad start. I was down big by tuesday so i just stopped trading and decided to just watch and trade a demo account. That didn’t work any better either as I got stopped out on almost all my trades. Often I would pick the correct direction in general but was not able to with stand the wipsaw of the market and my stops would get hit. I will try again next week.
What do you think of this admittedly strange line of thought:
1) it seems clear that most traders lose more money than they make.
2) it follows then that if most traders would have done the opposite trades, they would have made money (of course not as much as they lost, because of the spread, but still, generally positive)
3) therefore, (and this is the crazy part) plan your best trades, but click BUY instead of SELL and SELL instead of BUY, and you should come out ahead.
I have often wondered if this would work in practice, and have even tried applying this on a demo account, but it is really hard to actually place a position against what makes sense to you, even if it makes sense empirically to do so.
Uri, I’ve often wondered the same. I agree that it would be hard to place a trade when you don’t technically believe in it. I’m still convinced that most traders lose money due to poor money management. From my experience, this certainly seems like the case. A majority of my “big” losses have been due to impulse trading and poor money management.
still, if one is trading with a style that captures large pip movements (but unfortunately on the wrong side of the trades), then if the trades were reversed, theoretically a win should result. this would probably work even BETTER with impulse trades (as long as one remembers to reverse the desired trade), which would seem to otherwise normally be the biggest losers - perhaps it’s worth an experiment
anyways, good luck for a better week!