[charles1]

GREED GREED GREED. Do yourself a favor and create rules for your trading. Laminate them and glue to your trading desk. Never sway from your rules. If you do sway from your rules write down why? There is no such thing as greed in paper trading... i.e. lets say you open a position in a paper account, and you set no stop. Than you go to the bathroom, the kitchen, answer the door, etc., etc... Than you come back to your trading desk and see you profited a lot from the position and choose to flat it or cover it. You wold never do such a thing with real money till you got really really good at trusting your trading skills and handling your emotions... A really good trader is emotional sound. And anyone who can learn to trade a real account like a paper account will enjoy immense riches. When real money is on the line "attachment begins", there's no feeling of attachment with a paper account....

[juniorh]

Originally Posted by trelco »

lol okay but it is basically people who can't manage their emotions that are trading on what they "think" (eg: this will come back to me or I need to take profits now +1tick). Also the fact that this seems to attract gambling types who take illogical risk.

My main problem if anything is that I hold winners too long and sell losers too early when I diverge from the system. Divergence generally only happens when I rush through the set up. This accounts for 3% of trades when I replay tested my system by hand for several years. This is unlikely to happen in real time because I won't have to get through 1000's of set ups in a day. The losses because of that are equivalent to taking 1 extra emergency stop per year. Relatively insignificant. The other part about forward testing: because of the way it was built that is already factored in/done.

So far today I am a little over +$2100 using 1 ES contract. After a couple of weeks like this I think I will increase size. I skipped NFP.

After all the zerohedge propaganda, poor retail performance studies, and general sub 100%+ returns people have posted with under 300k AUM I figured there had to be some mysterious market force that screwed people out of their money...

I guess even with all the resources of the internet there is a lot of dumb money floating around...

W.C. Fields famously said, "It is morally wrong for a sucker to keep his money".