Moment that changed you from losing to winning trader

Hi guys,
Tell us, what was the breaking moment in your trading, when you changed from losing to profitable trader.
My moment was, when i stopped using stoplosses.

Can I assume from the stunning silence that there aren't any profitable traders here :-)

There is only around 5% of profitable traders, so it will take longer time, before they start posting interesting contrinbutions.

There's no moment, no single thing you do. It's a very long journey with no end.

theHand posted:
There's no moment, no single thing you do. It's a very long journey with no end.

Don't agree, there is atleast one AHA moment on the long journey when you stop actually losing money and instead earning profits.

Thomas Edison might disagree.

Guess, because he wasn't trading, right?

JojoW posted:
Hi guys,
Tell us, what was the breaking moment in your trading, when you changed from losing to profitable trader.
My moment was, when i stopped using stoplosses.

If you're not using stoplosses, then the next question is 'How long will it take for you to lose your whole account?'

I know it is a huge temptation to just avoid stoplosses and let your trades open indefinitely. That strategy, combined with grid and/or martingale, can work for sometime, but it always leads to disaster in the end.

Let me give you my own answer: I started to win when I studied the basics of trading, learned to program my own robots and changed all my trading from manual to automatic, with my own indicators and strategies. This is not to say that manual trading cannot be successful, it was just to stressful for me.

@JojoW

He learned. Same thing we do in trading. There's only one way to learn. All those times you burned your fingers, so you don't put it on the stove anymore. And eventually it's not so much what you do, it's what you don't do. There's no 'Aha..!' moment. Just a whole bunch of burned fingers.

mibw posted:
If you're not using stoplosses, then the next question is 'How long will it take for you to lose your whole account?'

I know it is a huge temptation to just avoid stoplosses and let your trades open indefinitely. That strategy, combined with grid and/or martingale, can work for sometime, but it always leads to disaster in the end.

Let me give you my own answer: I started to win when I studied the basics of trading, learned to program my own robots and changed all my trading from manual to automatic, with my own indicators and strategies. This is not to say that manual trading cannot be successful, it was just to stressful for me.

If you are using stoplosses or not at all it's not important. What's important is to know when you are wrong and when to close the trades and of course always favorable reward\risk ratio at any given trade. Not using the stoplosses and managing my trades manually just spares me from all those losing trades (caused by short term volatility) that trigger your stoplosses only to turn into your direction after few pips. Hint: just look how many times strong supports/resistances are penetrated and not closed above/below.

theHand posted:
@JojoW

He learned. Same thing we do in trading. There's only one way to learn. All those times you burned your fingers, so you don't put it on the stove anymore. And eventually it's not so much what you do, it's what you don't do. There's no 'Aha..!' moment. Just a whole bunch of burned fingers.

Don't agree. There were multiple moments in my trading career, like trading very good or bad news isn't profitable, as news are often misused to manipulate retail sentiment etc.

I was hoping, there would be more pro traders here to exchange here experiences.

The mechanics of trading is no different then the mechanics of gambling.No single hand is important.You can be negative in term of weekly basis while always positive when looking at longer term gain.This is what we call expectancy.
Expectancy is based on two things
1) Winning percentage
2) Risk/ reward ratio

Having low winning percentage is acceptable, but less then 1, risk/reward ratio can be disastrous, especially with the unknown nature of our system winning percentage within an infinity samples of trades.
I know i've understand trading when i've understand both of this principles.But, implementation is another thing.We'll just have to keep improving,dont we?
Use a stoploss, you're violating the second cardinal rules of trading.The end won't be good.

Have a sound trading plan, gain experience on a demo account. Trading is not a game, treat it as investing think like a banker, have a feel for market sentiment. What session should you trade, are the Europeans buying or selling are the yanks buying or selling, there are a 1000 different variables. If you don't use stop losses you are at serious risk e.g.. swiss removing peg on euro, Japan earthquake tsunami. News events. Don't watch your trade on a small time frame e.g. m5 or m15 watch it on h1 or h4, it give you a bigger picture and more confidence on why you have entered that trade.

Experience is everything, how long does it take to become an expert at something ? Answer years. Practice on a cross thats not so volatile. There are great trades out there take the time to find them and you will. Be patient, thats when you will become one of those 5 per cent of successful investors

Im not now long distance profitable trader, i'm on the way. But my results were radicaly changed when i realised that without stops i never become profitable. Excessive outstaying in losses will lead to damage.

Market is dynamic and changing, you need to be able to react what the price is doing, in order to survive. That means you cannot just place TP on fixed reward/risk ratio and SL, but be adapting and take what the market offers.

the moment that change my losing to winning trade is the moment when i can kill my emotion.
When we are able to master our emotion,our mind become so clear.
i use stop loss though,even when i put it at a long distance,usually my stop loss is 300 pips ahead.

zanzuk posted:
the moment that change my losing to winning trade is the moment when i can kill my emotion.
When we are able to master our emotion,our mind become so clear.
i use stop loss though,even when i put it at a long distance,usually my stop loss is 300 pips ahead.

Stoploss 300 pips is quite big, didn't you tried to optimize is to small pips value?

still trying lol

JojoW posted:
Market is dynamic and changing, you need to be able to react what the price is doing, in order to survive. That means you cannot just place TP on fixed reward/risk ratio and SL, but be adapting and take what the market offers.

I do that day in and day out..and im doing okay.