Thank you for your comments, really appreciate your gratitude for the videos and articles – that is rewarding to hear!

I have definitely been where you are in terms of those times when it’s tough to figure out which way is up and what to do or not to do next. Losing streaks have a way of clouding our thinking, and before we know it our whole approach can be in a fog.

I applaud your decision to spend the week reviewing trades. When in doubt, don’t trade. Spend that time doing something more productive, like digging through results to find clues to assemble into actionable information. If more traders who are in a funk would do that, more would survive I think.

As for my first ‘successful system,’ I’m confident that luck played a role (did someone say bull market?). But the truth is that every approach I’ve taken has required that I do it consistently for a little while before I could really decipher whether or not it’s working.

Trying something new for a couple days isn’t nearly long enough, but 6 months can be too long to give a method before pulling the plug on it and going back to the drawing board. Somewhere in between will be right, and it will boil down to your timeframe and trade frequency. The key is consistency and staying disciplined. With those two ingredients, a lot of mistakes can be avoided.

Jeff

Thanks for stopping by and for your comments. It can definitely take a toll on us mentally when we go through those tough stretches, so the psychological element is far bigger than most will give it credit for. But even near-random entries will still give us chances to profit and manage risk, which is truly our job as traders.

Jeff

i’ve been in a real long losing streak. can’t seem to get out of this hole. its been several months now since i’ve been able to grow my account. i keep trying different strategies and now i am just taking this whole week to review old trades, paper trades, etc to come up with a system that works based on the numbers…but definitely frustrating. how did you come up with your first successful system? i can’t seem to figure it out. thanks jeff!

could never pinpoint what the exact problem was no matter how hard I tried to fix. Guardrails seemed only to create other ways to loose money. Rigid rules for setups (as I saw them) just began to show that it’s hard to get an entry that much better than random for anything I could think of.