Trader Mindset

Chartists are discretionary traders. This is true for those who have a CMT designation.

How can you define your edge if you are looking at the same charts everyone else is looking at?

Charts need to be interpreted. That's discretionary.

You don't have the same emotional makeup that your chart-teaching coaches have.

You don't have the same life experiences that they do.

If you haven't backtested your rules, you don't know your numbers. What is the expected value of a trade that you put on in a head and shoulders formation?

It's integral to know if you are trading too big or too small for the risk that you are willing to take.

What is your optimal bet size for any trade that you put on?

What is your risk of ruin?

Don't optimize for share size or contracts...that's amateurish.

Forget tiers...

Most indicators are lagging indicators, they don't give you trade signals for entries or exits.

Indicators are emotional band-aids and won't relieve you of having to live with the uncertainty that we are traders must live with. We must make decisions with imperfect and incomplete information. That's the world we choose to live in. 

Learn to develop your inner voice - for free. 

Measuring your activity is a good way to begin improving your trading. Time blocking is more quantitative.

You can add qualitative aspect of it also by calculating the sum total of all your trading activity each day.

By the end of the week, you'll be able to see what you're earning per hour.

Marry this with your trading journal and you'll be able to determine what your time and efforts are worth fundamentally.

How effective and how efficient are you at what you're doing?

Challenge yourself to always get the most insightful information you can on your own behavior.

Be brutally honest with yourself. No one else will and you don't want to mindfuck yourself into eternity.

Control what's controllable.

Here is a great book on gaining insight on yourself. It's free.

Measuring your activity is a good way to begin improving your trading. Time blocking is more quantitative.

You can add qualitative aspect of it also by calculating the sum total of all your trading activity each day.

By the end of the week, you'll be able to see what you're earning per hour.

Marry this with your trading journal and you'll be able to determine what your time and efforts are worth fundamentally.

How effective and how efficient are you at what you're doing?

Challenge yourself to always get the most insightful information you can on your own behavior.

Be brutally honest with yourself. No one else will and you don't want to mindfuck yourself into eternity.

Control what's controllable.

Here is a great book on gaining insight on yourself. It's free.

Your #1 job as a trader or speculator is to play superior defense. "Your first loss, is your best loss."

Bad news becomes worse news, it rarely gets better. Offset the risk and then you can think with a clearer head.

Don't lament over a losing position when your emotional and financial systems are shocked. Use you entry rules to get back in. That's the best you can do today.

Your main goal is to preserve you capital and play superior defense. I'm not a big fan of band-aid positions - to me it's black and white. You're making money or not.

Follow you rules, but have a circuit breaker that you enact when an outlier event hits one of your positions.

Get the Inner Voice of Trading Audiobook Free.

Your #1 job as a trader or speculator is to play superior defense. "Your first loss, is your best loss."

Bad news becomes worse news, it rarely gets better. Offset the risk and then you can think with a clearer head.

Don't lament over a losing position when your emotional and financial systems are shocked. Use you entry rules to get back in. That's the best you can do today.

Your main goal is to preserve you capital and play superior defense. I'm not a big fan of band-aid positions - to me it's black and white. You're making money or not.

Follow you rules, but have a circuit breaker that you enact when an outlier event hits one of your positions.

Get the Inner Voice of Trading Audiobook Free.

How you place value on your time or money determines your trading style.

If you value your time more, you're likely not sitting in front of a wall of monitors all day. It's not worth your time.

If you value your money more, you may be holding on too tight and thinking that you have more control over your risk by sitting at a monitor. You don't.

That's the illusion of control.

Stop orders will get hit regardless of whether you're watching them or not. Let your control issues go. Delegate your hyper vigilance to your stop orders.

Acting this way is a bad habit.

Find out what works and scale that.

Backtesting will get you a good idea of what has worked in the past.

If what you're using is available to the general public, how do you think that adds to your trading edge? It doesn't.

Two Free Offers:

Tony Saliba's Options Playbook

Inner Voice of Trading Audiobook

How you place value on your time or money determines your trading style.

If you value your time more, you're likely not sitting in front of a wall of monitors all day. It's not worth your time.

If you value your money more, you may be holding on too tight and thinking that you have more control over your risk by sitting at a monitor. You don't.

That's the illusion of control.

Stop orders will get hit regardless of whether you're watching them or not. Let your control issues go. Delegate your hyper vigilance to your stop orders.

Acting this way is a bad habit.

Find out what works and scale that.

Backtesting will get you a good idea of what has worked in the past.

If what you're using is available to the general public, how do you think that adds to your trading edge? It doesn't.

Two Free Offers:

Tony Saliba's Options Playbook

Inner Voice of Trading Audiobook

Learning to pitch backers is a great skill to scale your trading business.

Go from trading your account to several accounts to getting big allocations from Global Macro Hedge Funds.

You are great at what you do and it's a unique skill to manage risk in the markets.

Business owners know what they know about their own business, but it's a rare skill to have to manage risk in the markets. Partner up with successful business owners because they are risk takers by nature.

Even just the simple process of keeping losses small is a big leap for many potential business owners who you can partner up with.

Two Free Offers:

Tony Saliba's Options Playbook

Inner Voice of Trading Audiobook

Learning to pitch backers is a great skill to scale your trading business.

Go from trading your account to several accounts to getting big allocations from Global Macro Hedge Funds.

You are great at what you do and it's a unique skill to manage risk in the markets. 

Business owners know what they know about their own business, but it's a rare skill to have to manage risk in the markets. Partner up with successful business owners because they are risk takers by nature. 

Even just the simple process of keeping losses small is a big leap for many potential business owners who you can partner up with.

Two Free Offers:

Tony Saliba's Options Playbook

Inner Voice of Trading Audiobook

When bad news hits the tape everything is correlated and it always works against you.

You have to be careful that parts or segments of your portfolio don't become "one big trade."

Study the correlation risk between instruments and modify your position sizes in your trading system and portfolio accordingly.

Since instruments can behave similarly, you can inadvertently end up with the financial effect of over 100% of the risk you think you have.

This will cut your vol and smooth out your equity curve.

Two Free Offers:

Tony Saliba's Options Playbook

Inner Voice of Trading Audiobook