Understanding Myself at the Start
Posted by huntingr on October 3, 2006
A big part of making it in any job is ambition and capitalizing on your strengths. Trading can be a tough job when trying to asses your strengths and weakness. It seems once a person has a large enough sample size you could pour through you records, given that you have keep any records, to see what you could discover. But what are you suppose to do during the learning curve when you don’t have a large enough sample size. The one thing you don’t want to do is base a bunch of trading rules around three trades. This is what all to many traders seem to do.
I guess you could start with the basics:
Risk Control – track your trades in such a way you see how many times you lose more than what your initial risk was. You could also track each mistake and put a $ sign on it to show you what it cost – as in this article.
Following the Plan - This is probably best thought of as a living organism, something that will change overtime. Lay your starting plan on the table and make adjustments to it as your trading experience grows. I wonder how much trading failures are simply related to the fact we as humans refuse to learn from our mistakes. That number could be scary.
Start – Start with very few shares until you get at least 25 to 50 trades under your belt to start looking things over.
It might be nice if you had a fellow trader look over your trades to give you a third person point of view.
