1/23/2025 - On Monday, January 27th at 4:30 PM ET, Agnieszka Wood and I will conduct a free hour long "ask me anything" (AMA) session. One thing that will make the session unique is that Agnieszka and I will approach questions from different, complementary angles: how our mindset can improve our trading and how improved trading practices can fuel our mindset. Should be a great opportunity to pick up best practices all the way around! One thing I'll discuss is how bigger picture thinking can improve our short term trading and how honing short term trading skills can help us get the most out of our higher time frame views. Registration will be limited; hope to see you soon!
1/22/2025 - We can approach trading from a bottom-up perspective (watching for real time shifts in buying/selling pressure) as a scalper or from a top-down perspective (watching for backtested patterns and catalysts over longer time horizons) as a swing trader or active investor. One approach is grounded in the talent of fast thinking and acting and pattern recognition. The other approach is grounded in the talent of analysis and bigger picture thinking. Success comes from knowing where your greatest talent lies and then developing the skills to apply that talent consistently. Many seeming psychological challenges of trading stem from the fact that we're not utilizing our greatest talents--
Suppose you could only trade once per day, but at any time of the day?With only one bullet to fire, you would have to make sure the opportunity was outstanding.
What information would you gather to identify the one good daily trade? Knowing this constraint, you'd have to study, study, study the best trades that could have been placed each day and generate a creative plan for exploiting the single best opportunity.
How would you size the daily trade? What would you need to see to add to your position? What would you need to see to take profits? What would stop you out of the daily trade?
If you only traded once per day, what do you think your win percentage would be? How do you think your profitability trading once per day would compare to your current profitability?
What would be your greatest psychological challenge if you only traded once per day? Knowing that you're limited to one trade, what constructive activities would you engage in while the one good trade was setting up?
What if anything more than one best trade per day makes minimal money on average? What if all your time and effort watching screens and trading in and out of the market does not add significant value to your trading? To your life?
This will be an experiment I pursue in 2025. Discoveries come from asking new, different, and difficult questions.
Further Reading:
Expanding Our Trading By Imposing Constraints
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