Saturday, April 11, 2009

** VIDEO ** The Weekend Trader

Please note before you watch this that my reference to "Thursday and Friday" were really to "Wednesday and Thursday" as I was simply recalling the last two trading days which -- of course -- are usually Thurs and Fri. Duh.

Anyway, today I follow up on Wednesday's talk to Linda Raschke's team as I expand on and clarify a few of my responses with respect to stops and trading system setup. I also touch on the harmful concept of a daily or weekly goal, as well as the irrelevance of short-term results from any system or methodology.

Enjoy the video and weekend.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Don,

Thanks for your comments on the video. I found this week's comments to be particularly helpful, especially the thoughts regarding the dangers of being myopic (i.e setting daily or weekly targets) in one's goalsetting instead of longer term goals.

This has often been a weakness of mine. For example, this week I was actually a net loser even though I traded better than I have in a long time. On Thursday, I got caught short in the WFC news at around 8:30 AM and cut a $1,500 loss down to about $500 by the end of the day. Since I had a WEEKLY (not to mention DAILY) goal of making money, though, I left my trading station on Thursday feel down INSTEAD of congratulating myself for honing my skills (i.e. most importantly extricating myself from a bad situation with minimal damage).

This instance, though, along with one or two other experiences over the last month have caused me to NOT trade Globex, at least for a while, since this has been the source of recent losses for me.

Surprised you are working outside today (I am too). It is cold and rainy and dreary here in New England! Oh well, I guess the yard has to be cleaned up sometime!

I'm always watching and reading, even if I'm not posting. Just wanted to stop by with a quick hello.

I wish you and your family a Happy Easter Holiday.

Sincerely,

Mike P.

Barefoot Trader said...

Hi Don,
Really appreciate your thoughts on goals. I do use daily goals, but they are performance vs. results oriented. For example, I've been struggling with letting trades run to full volatility. My goal has been to allow some of my position to "breathe" and capture bigger gains. This has worked well versus daily/weekly point goals which have not helped me at all. Anyway, it was good to hear your thoughts on the topic. Love the blog - all the best -
Steve

RexVulgaris said...

Just back from a weeks break in Ireland.

Thought provoking video as always... especially on the mental traps set by the setting of short term targets.. a nice repost to the 'we must measure everything crowd'


fwiw on thursday I did a 'donmiller special' just to see if I could and how it was

.. Trading from a laptop via mobile broadband on a beach in Donegal... 1 short trade sequence.. profitable.. I missed some of the extra nuances offered by multi screens.. but yes.. was perfectly possible.