Gold Spot / U.S. DollarEducation
determinant price action
12.9.19 years ago I used to get in so much trouble because I felt I needed to take a chance for a possibly very good trade i.e. it was worth the risk even though I wasn't totally comfortable with it. The problem is I became very stressed out and lost money. it took quite a bit of time before I realized something about my personal psychology that was getting in the way, and that was that I had to take this trade now because I may not get another chance for an opportunity like this. If you ask a lot of people with the significance of that is, I believe most people would not get to what I think is the most significant conclusion. I realized that my underlying psychology was that I would never get another chance and that I had to take this trade because good trades were so far in few behind, and there were many losing trades. To summarize it in a sentence, I was having so much trouble with frequent losses and very few highly profitable trades... and so my psychology was that if I don't take this trade I may not get another good opportunity for a long time.
in addition to having to re-examine and restructure my approach to the market, the one epiphany that evaded me for many years was that success was elusive and that I better take the trade now since I don't know when I'll have another chance... and in many ways this was the foundation to my failure when it came to daytrading. For some reason longer-term trading and taking larger positions when I knew there was a good opportunity never was stressful for me, it just wasn't a factor and I accepted that this kind of trading was longer-term and would offer fewer opportunities over a longer timeframe; it just didn't trigger my profound problems with shorter-term trading.
Why am I talking about this? in addition to learning how to read the market in a more discriminating fashion which eventually ended up with the tools and the analysis that I'm giving on these videos, I came to a profoundly different mentality in my thinking which runs counter to the way I carried on in other aspects of my life where I was attracted to adversity and challenging situations and never thought twice about taking on the challenge and battling towards the solution. I knew that when I did this it might not even be fun or exciting, and in fact with the many things that I've done in my life with this attitude, flying airplanes in IFR conditions that I was qualified to do, but I had no business doing it considering my capabilities, or sailing in boats offshore in bad weather when I had no business doing that, or making medical decisions in very difficult times, but in that case I was expected to do that and there was no option. TRADING is not the right situation to take on challenges when the odds are not in your favor, or you know darn well you don't know what you're doing but you're taking a trade when you have no idea what direction the market is going to go.
if your fundamental belief is that you know you're not competent, and that you're not sure what is going on, but she'll take a chance because this is the best you can do and you may not get another chance, you will be defeated by the markets. A better way to say this is that you will defeat yourself trading the markets. Learn the tools that you will need to use, determine through observation and examples that they can work for you, and through that experience develop a sense of confidence that the market will give you more than enough opportunities so that you don't have to take on the immediate situation when you know it is clearly not clear. And if perchance you miss an opportunity then take homage in the fact that you've avoided losses so many other times when you are not clear, and with regards to this trade that you may have missed you have an opportunity to study the market and make discoveries to move ahead with your understanding of the market, and it didn't cost you any money from your trading account.
I guess it could be a gesture of pride or arrogance that I bring up some of the things that I am proud to have done in my life. The thing is in those pursuits that I found exciting and that I pursued with an extreme intensity, there really were times in my life when I said that I could have died because of the chances that I took. And honestly, I've been shaken more than a few times in my life because I stretch the opportunity further than my capabilities and I was lucky. The fact is there were times 30 or 40 years ago when I deliberately did things was lucky that I didn't kill myself.
Now that I'm an old guy, there's an irony that I do things to avoid situations where the odds don't favor me. If you lose money trading it is true that this may not kill you, but when you lose a certain amount of money you are very likely to have no chance of success in achieving your dreams. In medicine we say there can be a faint worse than death. In trading you do not want to lose your dreams.
in addition to having to re-examine and restructure my approach to the market, the one epiphany that evaded me for many years was that success was elusive and that I better take the trade now since I don't know when I'll have another chance... and in many ways this was the foundation to my failure when it came to daytrading. For some reason longer-term trading and taking larger positions when I knew there was a good opportunity never was stressful for me, it just wasn't a factor and I accepted that this kind of trading was longer-term and would offer fewer opportunities over a longer timeframe; it just didn't trigger my profound problems with shorter-term trading.
Why am I talking about this? in addition to learning how to read the market in a more discriminating fashion which eventually ended up with the tools and the analysis that I'm giving on these videos, I came to a profoundly different mentality in my thinking which runs counter to the way I carried on in other aspects of my life where I was attracted to adversity and challenging situations and never thought twice about taking on the challenge and battling towards the solution. I knew that when I did this it might not even be fun or exciting, and in fact with the many things that I've done in my life with this attitude, flying airplanes in IFR conditions that I was qualified to do, but I had no business doing it considering my capabilities, or sailing in boats offshore in bad weather when I had no business doing that, or making medical decisions in very difficult times, but in that case I was expected to do that and there was no option. TRADING is not the right situation to take on challenges when the odds are not in your favor, or you know darn well you don't know what you're doing but you're taking a trade when you have no idea what direction the market is going to go.
if your fundamental belief is that you know you're not competent, and that you're not sure what is going on, but she'll take a chance because this is the best you can do and you may not get another chance, you will be defeated by the markets. A better way to say this is that you will defeat yourself trading the markets. Learn the tools that you will need to use, determine through observation and examples that they can work for you, and through that experience develop a sense of confidence that the market will give you more than enough opportunities so that you don't have to take on the immediate situation when you know it is clearly not clear. And if perchance you miss an opportunity then take homage in the fact that you've avoided losses so many other times when you are not clear, and with regards to this trade that you may have missed you have an opportunity to study the market and make discoveries to move ahead with your understanding of the market, and it didn't cost you any money from your trading account.
I guess it could be a gesture of pride or arrogance that I bring up some of the things that I am proud to have done in my life. The thing is in those pursuits that I found exciting and that I pursued with an extreme intensity, there really were times in my life when I said that I could have died because of the chances that I took. And honestly, I've been shaken more than a few times in my life because I stretch the opportunity further than my capabilities and I was lucky. The fact is there were times 30 or 40 years ago when I deliberately did things was lucky that I didn't kill myself.
Now that I'm an old guy, there's an irony that I do things to avoid situations where the odds don't favor me. If you lose money trading it is true that this may not kill you, but when you lose a certain amount of money you are very likely to have no chance of success in achieving your dreams. In medicine we say there can be a faint worse than death. In trading you do not want to lose your dreams.
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