Thursday 6 May 2010

The Cyclical Nature of Trading.


Hi Everybody,

My discussion of keeping the losses small over the last few days has been very timely because yesterday we had a hard day on the US e-minis. However, this should have been expected after the run of good trade recently, this is what I call the “Cyclical Nature of Trading”.

If we look at the 3min YM, we had a -1R loss early in the day, but it is the second sell (TS3) at 10:48EST that I want to take a closer look at. This is where common sense come it, and this is something that comes with experience, something that a purely “mechanical” trading system will never have and is why I am so against mechanical systems, because they can never have the “intuition” of a good Human Trader.

So here you are, on just over +2R Profit and you know that you have had a good run of good trades over the last few days, so you know you are “overdue” for some losses. So the “sensible” thing to do is protect this trade quicker so it is at least break-even. This is common sense trading.

The result is that the losses would been have kept to a minimum yesterday. And remember this comes only a day after a nice +5R day on the ES the day before...................... Small losses and Big Profits – are you starting to see how this is the key to a successful long term treading approach :)

Thanks, Steve