Chopped into Indecision - Some Thoughts on jacesabr_real's query

If you’ve even felt chopped up with your trading, particularly with a situation where no matter what you do you ‘feel like your stop is getting picked off’ then you would not be alone.

jacesabr_real reached out with such a challenge last week and so I’ve offered to share a few thoughts for what they're worth. Please feel free to take what resonates and ignore the rest.

here's the original idea post :

There are 3 areas a trader needs to understand and align with in order to be able to trade successfully:

• Market - The market condition: Bull, Bear, Sideways, Quiet Volatile, etc
  
• Method - Your process/strategy for engaging with the market (breakout, mean revert, etc)
  
• Mindset
  

- The emotional state of the trader throughout the lifecycle of the trade

These 3 areas overlap and despite being last in the list, I suggest that Mindset is the most important as it underpins everything. The late (great) Dr Van Tharp (featured in the original Market Wizards book) used to say that Mindset accounted for 80% of performance but later amended that to 100%.

So I’ll address this from that focal point. The reason? It’s the mind from which the process/strategy is selected, the ‘impulse’ to trade emanates and then the lived experience resides.

If a trader is having challenges with being stopped out frequently - it can result in a trader feeling like…
‘They’re picking me off’
'I was ticked out'
'The idea hasn’t failed, I’m just going to get back in again'
And it's easy to get into a revenge cycle of ‘doing the right thing’ but suffering fractional loss accumulation that adds up to a decent sized (even catastrophic) loss.
Which can lead to a loss in confidence, energy and discipline.

It’s a slippery slope. Which can lead to behaviours such as moving stops, sizing up bigger to make back, taking stops off entirely - continuing to take more trades as one is feeling ‘invested’ in the idea by sheer virtue of time spent in the process. Continue like this - maybe we get lucky and get the odd win to flatten out. Over time however, the risk is Tilt.

As you will likely understand, this is a massive area, so, a few general points that I’ll invite you to consider:

Approach your trading in this order: Mindset → Market → Method
Your Mindset may start out strong but the Market will try to wear it down
Protect your Mindset at all costs
Build steps into the process to simplify decision making.
Be clear on your rules for entry, management and exit. If you're unclear - you'll ask questions of yourself in the moment of the trade when it's hard to think clearly.
Ensure there are rules around capital preservation.

Some Suggestions:

• Don’t allow revenge trading to take over… create breaker switches. (i.e. walk away!, take breaks)
  
• Allow a re-entry of the same idea as part of your Method… but cap the number of attempts at the same trade idea to preserve capital and sanity (to perhaps 2 or 3 attempts).
  
• Don’t remove (or move) stops… ever. Always have a worst case stop for risk management
  
• If you’re getting stopped out frequently but the trade idea ultimately goes in your favour then your stop may be too tight (more to do with Market & Method)
  
• Use a larger worst-case stop… and reduce position size if necessary
  
• Monitor changes in volatility for your market (the Market condition may have changed and require an adaptation to your stop sizing to accommodate
  

With regards to your specific questions the following thoughts came up for me.

1. Many of your what if scenarios suggest that you may still need to look at your method. Pick an exit mechanism and stick with it. Collect the data points that will help inform whether your strategy is positive expectancy or not. If you keep changing the variables its really tough to track what works and what doesn't.
   
2. Get to understand your strategy and the stats around it. What is ‘normal’ in the way of number of losses. I’d suggest that seeing 4-5 losses of the same trade type a number of times a week might be a lot.
   
3. Consider the language that you are using. I notice the phrase ‘suicide stop’. Consider what that does to psychology subliminally. Perhaps use something like ‘hard stop’ or ‘capital preservation stop’ to keep your emotional balance and professionalism in your craft.
   

I hope this is helpful.