Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! Golden Rule 2 – Don’t manipulate a working system People say: “Never touch a running system”! Last year I was invited to a birthday party and there was a barbecue. 5 guys were standing around the grill, trying to get the coals to glow! They used sticks and other gear to optimize the coals. They tried to improve everything, even used a hairdryer. It didn’t work! Today I think about that party whenever I have the wish to “improve” my productive trading system. I have bought a little tool, that works like a hobo stove! See the Wikipedia article Hobo_stove for details…. I bought this little thing for about $5 in a local store and now I just need to fill in the coal, use a grill lighter and come back 15 minutes later for a perfect barbecue experience! It is a reliable, easy system that has worked for me every time I used it. I still believe, those barbecue experts would think they could do it better – even if I would show them a video from that birthday party where they couldn’t do it! They probably would find reasons. The coal wasn’t dry enough or the wind wasn’t helpful. Whatever… It is not hard to come up with an explanation why they could do it better this time. We all still believe that we will have more money in the future, do our exercises regularly and become fit, thin, wealthy and smart. It is said that man will even try to find a solution for a flickering lamp on his deathbed, because humans are hardwired to believe that the future is going to be better – if we improve something! You can watch countless gamblers in Las Vegas doing crazy things to improve the outcome on slot machines. They might use a talisman or cover the display with their hands. They push buttons at a certain time and try to influence the outcome in any way they can imagine. But you and I know, that those slot machines are 100 percent automated today. You could hit those machines with a hammer and it wouldn’t change a thing about the money that comes out of those devices. And those gamblers know that – but they can’t change their behaviour – because they feel better when they do whatever they do. Humans are hardwired to look for heuristics to improve things. You can think of heuristics as an abbreviation to find faster solutions without spending too much brain energy. So whenever you see something that isn’t working as expected, your brain will try to find a better way. But it is lazy, so it is looking for a fast and easy solution that doesn’t cost too much energy. Usually this is what happened if we find ourself asking what we have seen on the chart when we started that one, big losing trade a few days ago. Golden Rule 2 – Don’t manipulate a working system Profitable trading is not about you! It is about profits! To be a profitable trader you must have rules and you need to stick to those rules. If you have a rule to close a trade when X happens and that produces a loss, take the loss! If you have backtested the Forex Trading Framework, you might have seen losses that occur just because your trading system needs to close all the open positions on the last day of your backtesting period. In reality you would never close all positions with a loss – just because it is December the 31th, but the Strategy Tester will do that because it doesn’t care! Caring, feeling good or bad, the desire to fix or improve something that isn’t broken is what humans do. We call that manipulation of a working system! If you want to manipulate your trading system, bend your trading rules, act according to your emotional state, you are probably broker food. You need to find something you know, trust and can stand. It doesn’t matter if it is the Forex Trading Framework, one of my systems or your own system. Every interaction with anything you do is based on emotional triggers. If you wouldn’t care, you wouldn’t do anything. Your broker will make a lot of money from people who are a victim of their own feelings.