Enter The Matrix

In this entry I want to talk about something that I'm very fascinated about and it's also a subject that often gets overlooked by a lot of newer and beginning traders. Psychology and emotions. Looking inside yourself and finding out how it all correlates to trading. It is my personal belief that the mental aspect plays at least a 90% role when it comes to trading. Learning the technical analysis and how to read a chart is actually the easy 10% part of the game. A lot of traders say 'trade without emotions', or 'trade like a robot' and you'll have success. These types of statements are just simply contradictory and well far beyond from the truth. The market in it self moves based on emotions. It's impossible to make rational decisions without emotions. Recent psychological and neuroscientific research has been revealing that emotion and cognition are closely intertwined. Emotion facilitates how we perceive our world and organized our memory in making ...

Okay, I feel that I really need to get this blog out asap as I find it imminent to address this issue before I see anymore account blow ups or bad losses.  I've seen too many and I personally have blown up quite a few accounts my self.  No one should be losing this much money if they apply this very basic principle I'm about to talk about.  How to set proper goals, and defining the moment when we are a consistent winning trader. If any of you have read my past blog entry, I have shown pretty clear that it is absolutely impossible to know what the market will do let alone control it.  The only thing that we, as traders have absolute 100% control over is how much money we lose, or willing to risk. That is the key differentiation between trading and gambling. With that said, I see some traders set daily goals for themselves. Many of them set monetary goals like, 'I'm want to make $100-$150/day. I want to make 'X' percentage of my account daily/weekly/monthly....

Everyone and their grandma is looking for that secret sauce, the holy grail to trading, to put it in simple terms, the ‘edge’. Today’s write up I want to talk about that. I have learned from a lot of gurus and successful traders for my past year and a half of trading, most of them are all able to do one thing, and they encourage you to do the same as well; being able to articulate what your edge is, simply use that on a day to day basis, and you will have success. I would like to define what an edge is though before we go any further, as there is a lot of misconceptions about what an edge truly is. Some think it’s a magical formula, some secret sauce, when in fact that is soooo far from the truth. Edge: A trading setup that has a higher probability of the stock price going in one direction over the opposite direction. I was a semi-pro poker player about 10 years ago. I studied day in and out on the subject, played 12+ hour days, learned to deal cards and dealt poker as well in un...