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Old 04-23-2007, 12:07 PM
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Re: Rewarding yourself

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Is there or should there be a different reward type/level for following the plan perfect that resulted in a loss and a win? I believe they both should be rewarded equally but the final result (monetary) makes it a slight difference, at least in my reward system. I think this is where the difficulty for news traders to grasp, you obey the rules and still get negative response (a gain) AND sometimes you get a positive response (a loss) even when you don't follow your rules. This create in the end a confused mesh of reinforcements that screw up everything in the end. Agree?
tor - great points. The problem all traders face is that until you know for sure that you can trade profitably, it's hard to reward yourself for losing money. And it becomes even harder when you stray from your rules and make money. You've just taught yourself that you can stray and make money; whereas your actual rules lost you money (at least on this particular day).

It boils down to knowing if you can make money following your rules or not. Until you are 100% confident, there will always be a game going on in your head.

That is the biggest challenge I have seen coming from an environment where everything was laid out in front of you, all you had to do was what you were told. We do not get that luxury in trading. Sure you can buy books and manuals, but there is no guarantee those even work. After years in the stock business and now years in trading, I can tell you that trading is much more difficult, esp in the beginning. And that is due to simply having to create your plan yourself from scratch and then see what works and what does not work. And hopefully you can stick around long enough to find what does work... It's a challenge to say the least.

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