April 23 2010 Overlay and Trades

This week was extremely tough and took a toll on me as well as a couple other traders I know.

I have been grinding it out for the post couple months and slowly refining my management style. Phasing out old habits and working exclusively on playing the game better.

At the level I am at, I am not working on structure or analysis. I have to make it clear that that the methodology I practice and my trading or two completely separate components.

I have the technical side down as evidenced by almost a full year of extremely accurate projections. As I trader, I am extremely reluctant to use the word never.

I have to say that I have never seen the methodology I practice go wrong. It has always held up. Me, the trader has been constantly wrong.

My focus shifted a couple months ago to how I play the game. This is because being a good trader goes beyond what can be seen and quantified.

I am constantly right but rarely capture what I intend to capture. This is because efficient execution and exiting is an art form that requires thousands of hours of refinement.

It requires picking yourself up off the floor over and over again after seeing your projection play out but still losing or failing to initiate.

I am practicing how I interact with the other market participants. The few that that are successful are out to take my money and it is me against them.

I am no longer looking for patterns or watching moving averages. These things can help but are meaningless unless you can defeat your opponent who is far more experienced and better capitalized.

I compare my trading to water that needs many levels of filtration and purification prior to being drinkable.

If there are five steps to this purification, I am in the middle of the third step. When number three is done, I think I can make a respectable living but there will be much further to go.

My success is completely dependent on how I play the game and interact with the other players. I have been seeing the market in a different light recently.

I fought extremely hard this week and am feeling it this evening. I am feeling physical symptoms from the effort that I put into winning this week.

I am still hitting old setups out of habit but also managing to hit new areas where I see inefficiencies and opportunity.

The thing that it most promising about this week is that I won even though I made several, I repeat, several mistakes. This is the consequence of pressing in the midst of adjusting my style.

I beat the market this week because I am tough. I have been hardened by months of heartache and disappointment in myself.

This is the process of refinement. I did not hit any home runs this week. My gain was modest at best but I am going to celebrate briefly which is something I rarely do regardless of performance.

This is because I won this week under heavy stress and very tough conditions. I found myself taking others money on a few occasions.

These trades were painful and felt wrong and those are the best kind.

I must learn to repeat and improve if I want to accomplish my goals.

My victory this week will be meaningless in Monday but for now, I will call this week "acceptable".

I have not done that for some time.