In learning to move with my trading teacher BTC I feel have come to a temporary dead end and have been stuck there for way longer than I am comfortable with. The problem is "successful trades".
Yes, you read that right.
The successful ones that convinced me of some of my strengths when it comes to market analysis - hitting incredibly unlikely midterm tops to the dollar especially. I do not think I exaggerate when I claim I excel at it and I am rather proud of some of those trades.
And that is precisely my problem!
Knowing I have a history with many successes in one discipline - in this case short selling midterm tops - and then being so hung up on it that I try to make that strategy fit any- and everywhere, all the time.
It's like an insecurity, an obsession born out of fear-based thinking that suggests I would fail if I tried anything else. And so of course in the end I fail because I force it, I morph into an involuntary one trick pony that (theoretically) knows better and has known better for longer than my mind can reconcile. And yet I keep doing it, like a junkie. GIVE ME MY SELL FIX!!!! Like I convince myself there is no problem to notice here...
My trading account size has certainly noticed though, ahahaha.
It sounds so simple in theory but resisting the urge to force a sell setup is much much harder than I first anticipated. MUCH.
They say "When all you've got is a hammer every problem you'll encounter will look like a nail" and that is so true. Sad but true.
Sad because acting against my better judgment and experience I still give considerable amounts made from my best trades back to a market that is obviously not ready to sell yet - even short term.
These setups do often trigger for me but only retrace about .4% or so before blasting higher and I get stopped out for minor losses, fees essentially.
It's like being obsessed with not wanting to miss "MY" dear sell opportunity that I completely ignore everything else.
Then I sometimes catch myself thinking semi-consciously: "So let me get this straight... You want to sell that point up there after two failed short attempts today... If you are so sure the price will get to that next level up there... have you ever considered, I don't know... going long until it reaches?"
WHAT?! Going long?! What an audacious proposition!! It's like adultery! How dare you suggest such an audacious course of action! Going behind the back of my beloved red-candle-setup princess?!
But I know it's true.
Selling prematurely is a fear-based trade, hoping that once the sell point hits I will be "the first" and have the market backing me up on the way down. But more often than not, the opposite is the case. All tops make tremendous sense, especially the second and third tops after the highest high of the day, but yet I find my ego throwing a fit against the very idea to go... WITH the trend until I have enough evidence that it is ACUTALLY time to go short.
I think it is "wanting to be a hero" syndrome or something of that sort, showing myself just how damn smart I am. Well congratu-fuckin-lations professor, you are going about this completely the wrong way!
So now I am coaxing myself into flipping my approach on the head after zen master btc has slapped me many more times with his bamboo stick this week, for projecting my single most precious competency on a plethora of situations and disciplines hoping I could somehow rise to the situation and prevail. Nononono. You can't simply get away with using a hammer in the kitchen or the garden you know. Only when it is time to hammer can you actually make use of a hammer. Get it already!
The realization is: You got to sense which way the wind is blowing and then take the hard trade. The hard trade being to buy higher and sell lower.
And incidentally I feel this would be a great time to share one of my more cherished trading teachers out there with you all - Tom Hougaard. A dude who often cites precisely this approach. But you know how it is - we often learn best from immediate experience not when a thousand people have told us precisely the same thing. So this is what I am working on right now:
You want to only buy when the market is trending up and only sell when it is trending down. Sounds super simple and no brainer'ish doesn't it? Considering how often this would work for me but how often I pride myself on being such an awesome rebel that wants to get one up on the market, it really is hard to overestimate just how essential this approach is to becoming a better trader.
And I feel I will find, that once I do the bulk of my trading in this manner, rather than anticipating sudden reversals of a trend that might take hours more to materialize, I will find much more space and ease in myself to take those awesome sell setups when they actually do materialize.
So much for smart trading in theory, ahahaha. Here is an excerpt of Tom for ya, the video is exactly about that, like "hitting a nail on the head" as the German tongue would say ;)
#1 - Trading Coins vs. Trading Futures
#2 - Altcoins vs. Leveraged BTC
#3 - Stop Listening To (Crypto) News (feat. Anton Kreil)
Mastering Bitcoin | BTC, My Greatest Spiritual Teacher Yet - Pt. 1
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