I don’t think I’ve been doing a very good job of generating developmental material for the site lately. The older articles I’ve written are still popular, but when I look at them now I mostly cringe. I think it’s because I was writing about problems I was overcoming, and now that I don’t have those problems, the posts seem silly. The old interview MWF recently posted reminded me of how different my viewpoint is today than it was in 2006.

It stands to reason that I would cringe less at more recent articles, if I would just write some. After all, I still have problems with my trading and I still work on them. It’s just that, the kinds of things I focus on now are more personal, and generally harder to put into words. And I am lazy.

I don’t mean personal as in private or embarrassing, but personal as in relating specifically to what goes on in my mind. And also, it’s harder to know when I’ve really “won” or learned anything worth passing on to others… it’s not as clear-cut as when I decided I knew something about profit factors.

I will give you an example. If I could change one thing about my trading today, I would want to trade all day as if it were my first trade of the day. If you read the site and watch the videos, you know that once I’ve made some decent money, I lose all motivation to trade. I still watch the markets, but none of the setups look good enough to me anymore. I feel sluggish and uninterested. On the other hand, when I’ve traded myself into a hole, I have no trouble finding good trades until I’m in the green again.

So, even though it presents itself as a kind of lethargy or distaste for trading, I have to assume that there’s some fear deep down of giving up the money I just made. Or maybe it’s something else. But the fear thing sounds good. I would like to fix this, because I think I would be well on my way to serious wealth by now if I could just keep trading enthusiastically. Trading stocks, I would usually take 3 to 5 trades, which for my style meant I had open trades in the market for a total of 2 or 3 minutes out of the market day. Obviously, there was room for a LOT more trades. The big downtrend on Friday gave me lots of opportunities in @ES that I didn’t take. You saw me take the first one effortlessly in the live trade video. Each trade after that took more willpower, and after I made a few more points I pretty much stopped at midday. Crazy!

So that’s the kind of thing I am focused on now. I am reading Trading in the Zone for the first time, in preparation for an eotpro event with the author. I had heard of the book a lot of times, but just never got around to reading it. Maybe I will find something in there, of use.

(aside: how stupid is it that Ari Kiev also wrote a book called Trading in the Zone? I didn’t even know that was allowed! I can tell you right now that my first two novels will be called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Holy Bible: King James Version).

Did Tom C ever start a blog? I think it’d be a more successful spinoff than, say, Joey.

(no, this isn’t the article I said I might write in my last video!)

I’ve been reading through the OONR7 blog this morning, and it looks pretty enjoyable.

Unlike a lot of you out there, I’ve never (to my knowledge) taken a “Trader-X” trade. I’ve just never had it in me… the profit targets always seemed too lofty (and when I saw new traders try it, they usually didn’t hit the extension with any consistency). More importantly, I’m just plain too lazy to draw the fib lines (and because I rarely do it, I can never remember whether I’m supposed to drag the line up or down–and I always guess wrong and have to redo it!). Sad, but true.

But, OONR7’s spin on this style looks a little better to me. He tends to use faster charts, and uses smaller intraday fibs. I may try this out next week, for laughs. I have a theory that the only real “strategy” is a feel for price-action, and all the rest is just a framework to help grab your attention at promising times. For instance, I’ve gone from daily breakouts to intraday reversal plays these last couple weeks, and my win rate and expectancy is pretty much the same. I went from time charts to volume charts to PnF charts a while back, and my win rate and expectancy are pretty much the same. To me, this means that the strategy you use and the charts you look at really aren’t what determines your results. Just find what’s comfortable for you to look at, and what most readily shows you what you want to see… at the end of the day, you’ve still got to guess which way price is going to go.

(this is still not the article… that’s still coming… probably tomorrow… I’m tired at the moment… netflix promised that Weeds, Season 2 will be in my mailbox if I can drag my ass out there to check… if so, watching those discs will be my main activity today.)