Friday, October 24, 2008

** VIDEO ** Moving Forward & "Swing Mechanics"

Here are some thoughts on the past week, moving forward, and trading "swing mechanics" prompted by the book "Golf is Not a Game of Perfect".

12 comments:

leonarbull said...

haha..good stuff..but try laying off that burger king if you want to have a sharp mind

Don Miller said...

Leonarbull -

I hear ya :-). I could also stand to lose a few pounds.

The striving for self-improvement never ends.

Don

aapl said...

morning don...

absolutely one of my favorite videos... i am not sure how many of your visitors realize just how vast your trading knowledge is, but we are all fortunate to have you "brain dump" on us!!! :-)

as i have stated before i have been following you since your ral/gio/beaver days, and look forward to reading/watching many more of your post...

ps...
don, i realize this is not a "teaching blog", but i would hope that you will bless us with small general snippets of how you maximize your tendencies to fade the market ...

god bless,
Duane
charlotte, n.c.

Don Miller said...

Thanks Duane -

Not sure about "vast knowledge" ... maybe "many self-inflicted and healed scars" is more appropriate :-).

btw, it was actually "badger" ... from the University of Wisconsin where I got my Executive MBA in the 1990s.

Seems like just yesterday.

Don

nocved said...

Hi Don

Awesome video. "Get over it and move on" has been the most helpful advice for this apprentice.

Thanks as Always
Tom

ps I think the Sox loss spilled over in my trading beginning of the week.:)

YM-Trader said...

Hi Don,
Regarding Friday’s video, it was refreshing (to a degree) to hear you talk about intuition and instincts as being a key to trading. This is of course not what new people (people who have traded less than 5 years) want to hear. Rookie traders have always been sold “easy and simple” plans that are in large part mechanical because it instills belief that anybody with a computer can be a success just by buying and selling when the little arrows show up on the screen. The truth of course is that trading is very hard. But rookies don’t want to pay big bucks to buy “hard work”. The longer I do this (2 years full time now) the more I try to strip it down and rely on a very few guidelines and even fewer hard rules. The rules are just to add some structure so as to eliminate some of the over-analyzing I am prone to do. And so I come to learn that intuition and gut feel, shaped by a few guidelines, is increasingly important. It’s no wonder that trading is a school you can never graduate from. At the same time I realize the value of intuition I also see the description of your trading course and figure “this guy must know every rule, trick, short-cut, and guideline”. And yes, I realize that all that course description is what created your intuition over time. We all have to start out with some hard rules and plenty of guidelines. We can’t short-cut it and just buy 12 years of intuition with a credit card payment. I mentioned “to a degree” in the first sentence simply to say that even 10 years from now I will still have some mechanical rules I will always honor just to reduce the brain chatter, even if my intuition says otherwise. There’s no question for you in all this, it’s just a comment. Thanks for the blog. It’s the best I’ve found and hope you continue into next year.
Chuck

Don Miller said...

Great stuff Chuck -

There are indeed no short cuts. Even in my teaching days -- despite best intentions -- you can't teach experience. I actually felt teaching was harder than trading!

Even after a decade, there are so many things I still need to improve on, there will never be enough time to do so.

I just hope there's enough time to at least tackle a few more.

Don

aapl said...

Don...

my apologies for the animal miscue...

i have no idea why i typed beaver instead of badger... lol

thanks...

Duane

Anonymous said...

Hi Don:

Great video. Do you visualize and or meditate prior to trading?


RONIN

Don Miller said...

Ronin -

I don't meditate, but I do continually have the fictitious drawdown chart in view ... which happens to be my wallpaper on all three of my main monitors, in addition to having a hard copy handy.

Don

Anonymous said...

Don, GREAT GREAT GREAT post. Keep em coming. Quick question, are your old teaching materials still a reflection of what you do today? If so, are they still available via your other website?

Don Miller said...

Hi spibok.

Thanks.

I do much of the same as then, keeping in mind I'm now a liquidity-providing member of the CME and use a few enhancements such as TICK & VIX to further skew advantage.

With respect to the old teaching products, that was a joint venture between me and Larry Connors' (co-author of Street Smarts) TradingMarkets company, and they're likely out of stock and I don't think they're replenishing it going forward.

Don