At some indeterminate point in the past after attaining some experience, common sense and a desire for balance, I made up my mind to a) limit my screen time, b) acknowledge and accept there are moves in the market I will not catch, and c) there are sensible and insensible times during the trading day to enter trades. These three decisions go together because the desire to the widest swath of pips possible (which B addresses), usually involves entering trades at both sensible and insensible times (C), which means screen time is really limited only by the weekend.
Good resolutions: better trades, less time spent staring aimlessly at glacial chart movement, less trading due to reasons other than high probability, edge-leveraged opportunities (like boredom). Occasionally, I dip my toe in those insensible times referred to in C to check in on them. Somehow the erratic, barely perceptible level of movement isn’t apparent just by observing the chart in this process: no, I (needless, let me stress) send in a dropsonde trade, or two (or four) for some empirical corroboration of what my eyes are telling me.
Today was one such day: and true to form, more often than not I regret what comes about and find myself thinking over the eternal verities that are A, B, and C above.
I threw these out on Twitter, but:
USD/CAD, GBP/JPY, EUR/JPY, GBP/USD, opened ~ 1830 ET today. In profit (about 2%) for a period, but with the time elapsed over a short drive that advantage was erased, leaving me -12, -21, -30, -5 when I closed the trades manually a bit ago, marveling at my own intransigence and lack of reflexivity.
And this is why I need no scheduled reminder of my own fallibility as a trader after an amazing run-up: I know I’ll lunge off into a silly frivolity that is more-or-less inconsequential, but serves no purpose and violates lessons I’ve already learned.
