Habits
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Habits can be good or bad, but most importantly you can teach habits, from a trading perspective, what are your best / worst habits?
Personally, i have done one thing that has revolutionised my mindset and it's pretty simple, i have two magnets on my fridge that act as a white board, you can get these in any homestore,
1st magnet - Trading hour count - everytime i spend an hour trading/researching/reading or watching youtube or video's i add an hour to the count, it's real good tracker in how much commitment you are spending on trading, If you want to go pro but only spend 4 hours a week then it will be evident on the count, 'those are rookie numbers, you have to pump those up' absolutely true, change the mindset put the hours in, it pays off!
2nd magnet, most importantly the profit/loss counter, it is well known that we as humans react best to visual aspects, for me putting my P/L up so i can see it on the daily has been the best addition, it changes mentality and most noticeably improves how you react to a losing day/run. Both Trading/Betting portfolios are in profit and have been consistently for a while, i know i'm playing with house money which is an added psychology win. I update it daily and have now started introducing new strategies to break it down.
Add those habits and you will benefit massively, most of you know i've been around for a while and was very successful prior to 2017, i had to start again for a personal reason but what that meant was i could banish the bad habits, by last quarter 2019 i will be past where i was, that means 8 years work previously will be matched and exceeded with 2 years of hard work. Put the hard yards in and anyone can make it.
Thank you
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@luke-ridger I can understand this!
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@simon said in Habits:
This week I have strated a trading journal with my plan written at the start of the day, and all my trading notes included, and then an analysis after the event of what went well and what didn’t. I previously just had a spreadsheet with all my numbers and a few notes. The difference in having a document with everything written down has been huge for me in this short time. Writing your thoughts down I find really makes you question them.
Worst habit at the moment is over trading, especially on quiet days. If I can’t find something I’m 100% happy with then I should just have a day off. I think my journal will definitely help with this and keep me more disciplined.
There is some sort of cognitive theory that writing things down and is a type of therapy too, fully recommend it.
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@simon I used to do that as well just trade it for the sake of it, I started getting away from the computer trying to move myself away from the temptation.
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This week I have strated a trading journal with my plan written at the start of the day, and all my trading notes included, and then an analysis after the event of what went well and what didn’t. I previously just had a spreadsheet with all my numbers and a few notes. The difference in having a document with everything written down has been huge for me in this short time. Writing your thoughts down I find really makes you question them.
Worst habit at the moment is over trading, especially on quiet days. If I can’t find something I’m 100% happy with then I should just have a day off. I think my journal will definitely help with this and keep me more disciplined.
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Love this topic!
My best habits are:
Mediation - this has made a huge change on my trading and life, took me a while to get into this but when I did it made a profound affect.
Trading Plan - writing this down everyday has kept me in line to do exactly what I should be doing and following the research methods and stick to those trading methods.
Worst habits:
Reading new things - sometimes I get quite excited by the idea of a new thing/trading way/event etc... only to find out with further reading it is pants!
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@chris-watts said in Habits:
Good conversation topic this, my best habit is keeping an evaluation matrix (not dissimilar to @Frode-Lia comments below).
Its a simple spreadsheet with columns for outcome, performance and process, its tagged into the spreadsheet I keep for results. At the end of each trading session when i've entered my results for the day I rank each of the headings from 1-5. 5 being the best and 1 being the worst. I then add the three columns up for a score out of 15 and convert it to a percentage.
Day on day then I can see if my performance was good, did i stick to the plan, did i miss entry or exit points, did i chase an entry around or was i patient, did i read the match correctly, was i paying attention to price points and there movement correlated to what's happening on the pitch.
Process - was my process solid, did i do the research, did the stats support my judgement, did i read around the wider topics that might influence the outcome, did i check the weather, did i look at the referee and his history, did i check team news and twitter. In this section I also factor in my mood, What was my mood like, was i hungry or rushed, was the environment suited to trading.
Outcome - what was it, did i make profit or loss.
I tend to give myself a 4 or 5 if I followed everything i should do and 1-2 if I took short cuts or omitted to do anything in my own best interest. I give myself a 3 if i was average and did most but not all.
Its really interesting to look back on the month and average out your score and compare the days when the results were good to the scores in my columns for performance and process.
My worst habit is probably getting married to my own ideas, this will happen! I know it will! oh wait the games over and it didnt! doh! I've worked mega hard to curb this and add in some risk management through staking and bank control.
Interesting,
I do like this Chris, i think trading has become more sophisticated as the years have gone by, now it's a case of not finding how profitable a strategy is but are there any flaws, Scientists spend years trying to disapprove theories but as traders we should be constantly asking questions of our systems and strategies to drive improvement and or growth.
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Good conversation topic this, my best habit is keeping an evaluation matrix (not dissimilar to @Frode-Lia comments below).
Its a simple spreadsheet with columns for outcome, performance and process, its tagged into the spreadsheet I keep for results. At the end of each trading session when i've entered my results for the day I rank each of the headings from 1-5. 5 being the best and 1 being the worst. I then add the three columns up for a score out of 15 and convert it to a percentage.
Day on day then I can see if my performance was good, did i stick to the plan, did i miss entry or exit points, did i chase an entry around or was i patient, did i read the match correctly, was i paying attention to price points and there movement correlated to what's happening on the pitch.
Process - was my process solid, did i do the research, did the stats support my judgement, did i read around the wider topics that might influence the outcome, did i check the weather, did i look at the referee and his history, did i check team news and twitter. In this section I also factor in my mood, What was my mood like, was i hungry or rushed, was the environment suited to trading.
Outcome - what was it, did i make profit or loss.
I tend to give myself a 4 or 5 if I followed everything i should do and 1-2 if I took short cuts or omitted to do anything in my own best interest. I give myself a 3 if i was average and did most but not all.
Its really interesting to look back on the month and average out your score and compare the days when the results were good to the scores in my columns for performance and process.
My worst habit is probably getting married to my own ideas, this will happen! I know it will! oh wait the games over and it didnt! doh! I've worked mega hard to curb this and add in some risk management through staking and bank control.
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@luke-ridger said in Habits:
Habits can be good or bad, but most importantly you can teach habits, from a trading perspective, what are your best / worst habits?
Personally, i have done one thing that has revolutionised my mindset and it's pretty simple, i have two magnets on my fridge that act as a white board, you can get these in any homestore,
1st magnet - Trading hour count - everytime i spend an hour trading/researching/reading or watching youtube or video's i add an hour to the count, it's real good tracker in how much commitment you are spending on trading, If you want to go pro but only spend 4 hours a week then it will be evident on the count, 'those are rookie numbers, you have to pump those up' absolutely true, change the mindset put the hours in, it pays off!
2nd magnet, most importantly the profit/loss counter, it is well known that we as humans react best to visual aspects, for me putting my P/L up so i can see it on the daily has been the best addition, it changes mentality and most noticeably improves how you react to a losing day/run. Both Trading/Betting portfolios are in profit and have been consistently for a while, i know i'm playing with house money which is an added psychology win. I update it daily and have now started introducing new strategies to break it down.
Add those habits and you will benefit massively, most of you know i've been around for a while and was very successful prior to 2017, i had to start again for a personal reason but what that meant was i could banish the bad habits, by last quarter 2019 i will be past where i was, that means 8 years work previously will be matched and exceeded with 2 years of hard work. Put the hard yards in and anyone can make it.
Thank you
My best habit is without a doubt journaling (or trading plan if you will) before and after trading sesions. Writing down what has worked and what has not, after trading sessions is the single thing that helped me the most in my trading. You see very easely where the faults are. My oldest journal is from 2013. That is also the year my P/L went green for the year for the first time. 2009 was my first year on BF.
I diverse them into three points:
- The Man
- The Method
- The Money
On loosing weeks its usually due to The Man. And there I am over to my worst habit.
If I only take my planed trades, I will usually be green on a week to week basis. The drawdown is usually on in play trades I think looks good there and then. Typical a LTD after half time. And why do I do that? Well, its saturday, 15:00 a clock. Most of my trades are pre game or first half, so then I open a beer. Get fired up. And take one or two or three LTDs and lose. So thats my worst habit. Or was my worst habit.
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Whilst in the ascendancy, one of the key aspects of what i've done is to make sure that any strategy i have with solid amount of data can be back tested and disapproved.
What do i mean? I'm going to take a simple LTD strategy in football, if you are hitting certain odds points say less than odds of 3, and you need certain shots count etc, i'm sure after time you have enough results to formulate a prediction but simply you probably need to do more than that, all my strategies are run through a monte carlo system, this simple but effective tool can predict your biggest downturn and show you if this is a consistent method, use this tool and make sure your strategy is profitable and consistent.
http://www.equitycurvesimulator.com
