Holding Yourself Accountable

[brownsfan019]

Interesting ideas here... it's always fun to see where things can morph to when the idea is tossed out there.

My immediate thoughts...

> I like the intimate, personal accountability. Looks great on paper. Concerned about how it can actually work in real life though, esp with every little personal detail out there... I know I would be concerned about that.

> I like the A-F scale that Dr Brett talks about. Simple and concise.

> James_gsx also has a nice looking template/sheet that we could model after.

> Similar trading styles groups sounds good as well. Looks like I will be a one man candle trading group though seeing that the active threads are VSA or some VWAP thing.

It comes down to how many are serious and will contribute. Just look at this thread - we have maybe 10 or so people posting in it. There could be many just reading and thinking - I'll join! - but I am not holding my breath either.

My immediate thought is that initially, we need to start with something that many can participate in and then see where it goes. For example - a simple template where you give yourself a A-F grade with some commentary is a great place to start. Why? IT'S EASY. Click A, B, C, D or F and then jot a few notes if you feel like it. Very similar to the elitetrader P&L thread but w/o actual numbers (unless you want to post) and with a grading scale.

From there we can see where it goes. Maybe a few dedicated hearts there can branch off and do their own thing. Maybe James can make a private area where you have to be invited to participate - you know, for the die hards.

Here's a quick thing I did in notepad to envision what I see here:




It's not much, but it's a start. Motion creates more motion and ideas, right? We've talked about this before, so it'd be nice to get something going this time around. The above setup gets it going real quick (I would think).

A complex, massive template can take awhile to program and could scare people off from using it IMO. I love what James_gsx has, but I also think something that intense could scare people off from using it.

Once it gets moving, we can see where it goes...

[james_gsx]

I like the A-F system with comments to start as it would be simple and something that could easily attract people to use. I will continue to use the template I created, as I think that will help me down the stretch.

The only concern I still have is where and how would we do the A-F system? Obviously a forum style won't work, since no one wants to make a new thread everyday. Maybe we could create a calender type thing. Monday - Friday with a quick grade next to it and notes so others can easily view. Monday would be at the top, then down to Friday. Or a simple calender could work as well. Those are just my thoughts, anyone have any opinions?

[darthtrader]

	Quote:	james_gsx
	but I like the idea of journaling each trade, grading it, and having my P&L. From there, we could log it on the website or excel and have it automatically track basically everything.

Personally, I think this area would be the most interesting to explore. The only thing we can really nail down that we all have in common is basically trading the same instruments.
I would love to have a program that I put in my entry/exit/stop and then a whole ton of metrics gets calculated.
if a winning trade...how much heat did the trade take, how much profit could you have made with a perfect exit on the setup while in the trade, what would the trade look like if you had held X minutes longer, Y minutes longer, X minutes shorter, Y minutes shorter. What if you had entered the trade X minutes earlier, Y minutes earlier.
all the same for a losing trade with a few others like if the trade was profitable at some point but turned into a loser, exited sooner, exited later, ect.
This would not make sense for scalping but I wouldn't think it should be that hard if using 1 minute bar data for ES, YM , NQ. Mysql database keeping the minute bar data around for 2 or 3 days and if you snooze you lose.
Your grade for trade location, getting jumpy and exit too soon, holding too long..it would all be a hard number and not just something qualitative. Have a variable that people can just name their setups and then over time you could track something like average heat on a particular setup.
Then just have a notes section for each trade to input observations, emotions, ect.

[james_gsx]

Just from the template I made earlier, I already found one of my biggest problems is exiting too early and letting myself get stopped out. Obviously that's not going to work over an extended period of time, regardless of how much money I made/lost today.

So from that data alone I can nail down two things.
1 - my targets are too big for the style of trade
2 - I get greedy and exit too early
3 - Both - I take a lot of contrarian plays and get trigger happy.

[Soultrader]

Let me bounce off some of these ideas with my coder and see what he can come up with. Itll take some time as I am extremely busy at the moment as well but will begin developing this project.

[brownsfan019]

	Quote:	Soultrader
	Let me bounce off some of these ideas with my coder and see what he can come up with. Itll take some time as I am extremely busy at the moment as well but will begin developing this project.

It really comes down to what the coder is able to do. There's so many ways this thing can go, so that's why I was thinking simple at first.

[darthtrader]

	Quote:	james_gsx
	Just from the template I made earlier, I already found one of my biggest problems is exiting too early and letting myself get stopped out. Obviously that's not going to work over an extended period of time, regardless of how much money I made/lost today. So from that data alone I can nail down two things. 1 - my targets are too big for the style of trade 2 - I get greedy and exit too early 3 - Both - I take a lot of contrarian plays and get trigger happy.

this is where i think something like "if I had held X minutes longer" over time would be amazing information to have. Especially once you have enough data points to chart what would happen with setup ABC if you had held 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 minutes longer. Also enough to compute a meaningfull average P&L if you had held X minutes longer. Improving your setup then would be nothing more than finding your average hold time for setup ABC, then using a stop watch or clock to make sure you stay in the trade avg hold time + whatever X minutes gave you the optimal result until your average hold time came more in line with adding the extra time to the setup. You would also start to see overall market conditions change when this stops working effeciently.
I don't know if this is realistic though to do on the web and not just on a local spreadsheet. Would be quite a project I would imagine.

[darthtrader]

Also for the chatroom, maybe have a few seperate chat rooms that only meet once a month to start out. Market profile room, candle room, vsa room. The chatroom is cool but to go on everyday I really don't want to know what other people using other setups are doing like that, gives too much bias to your view, especially if your doing something totally different than what the guy who said they bought/sold are doing.
If the chat sessions were more specific and infrequent I think alot more people would show up and we could all learn from eachother with more specific setups and less noise.

[now123pivot]

I like the idea of grading our days, though I will probably keep a more detailed journal for all trades taken throughout the day so I can go back and analyze them later.

Someone early on in this thread commented that they meet at the end of each week with a partner to discuss their week and I reckon weekly, rather than monthly, meetings might work out well ... that said, maybe we can establish rooms which meet more or less frequently (depending on demand) and see where that goes.

[brownsfan019]

	Quote:	now123pivot
	Someone early on in this thread commented that they meet at the end of each week with a partner to discuss their week and I reckon weekly, rather than monthly, meetings might work out well ... that said, maybe we can establish rooms which meet more or less frequently (depending on demand) and see where that goes.

And with something like PalTalk, that is super easy to do. It's a matter of interest and people following through.