Hello Traders.
T-Model Trader is back with his 8th blog post in the beginner trader series. I have included a picture of a beach so we can all get a little hint at how difficult it must be knowing that view is waiting for you only a few minutes away!
I do believe if I moved to Australia I would need to find a way to have high speed broadband for my laptop on the beach!
I hope you've all had a great trading week.
James Orr
Blog Post 8 From the T - Model Trader
I have to admit
that it has been a very slow start to the trading year for me. As I recall, I
wrote how I was looking forward to the new trading year in the last blog of
2016. Reality has it that I am seriously in summer holiday mode and the call of
the beach (3 minutes’ walk away) has got the better of me in the late afternoon
heat on many occasions (trading time for me here in Oz).
So, in this last
week and a bit, I have put on my trading cap (a DT one of course), wiped off
the sweat and have sat to write this and launch myself back into it all.
Sometime in 2015,
a few months prior to studying with DT, I read an article about getting to know
the market that you trade, authored by a very (Very) successful Australian
trade. As my trading knowledge and understanding at the time was several bucket
loads short of bugger all, then most of it entered and exited the brain
department without much of a fanfare.
I did however get
the general gist of what he was writing about, even if I thought that getting
to know a markets personality was bordering on being a bit ludicrous, as it all
just seemed pure randomness. How on earth I wondered, does one even go about
doing such a thing?
In that article,
there was one thing that has stuck in my mind thou. He stated that the “market
rewards the specialist, not the generalist”. In those first few months of
teaching myself trading prior to DT, I had untold numerous forex pairs set up
on the trading platform, as quantity equaled…..well…..something better than
what I knew at the time. I recall being so stressed out trying to figure out
how to remember what was what.
The thing was,
that at the time I was doing what so many do (I am assuming), which is to
listen to endless Youtube clips about trading. I would see these videos and when
they go to pull up a forex pair to illustrate some point, they would have a
squillion of them to choose from. And that is what I thought I had to do as
well. Damn near killed me thru neuron overload!
So when DT popped
into my life with just one market, although somewhat relieved, I was also a bit
puzzled. As I thought (lead to believe/assumed) my trading diet should be one
of maximum consumption, then one and only one market seemed like a bone trimmed
clean.
So, over several
months (besides the occasional dally on the ASX 200 (my daytime), the Ftse was
the only market that I looked at. Due to the timeframe difference, I would get
the market open to around about lunch time (GMT) before wandering off to bed. I
rarely missed a day. I sat and watched it all, candle by candle. No alarms set
to tell me when a zone was being tickled. It was dinner at the screen.
Besides the
inevitable numb bum, what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was getting
to know the market through an interactive osmosis. I would not have said that
at the time, basically because I didn’t understand it all enough to see that it
was happening.
Now the
interesting thing is that if the Aud/Usd (A$) had not come along, I wouldn’t
have realized this to be the case. It was in seeing an entirely different
market that I began to appreciate the fact that I had actually started to see
the Ftse markets “personality”. This was a really great thing to acknowledge.
What is also
intriguing, is that I felt so uneasy and uncomfortable on the A$ for quite some
time. I didn’t appreciate or understand this at the time, however after
watching and interacting with the Ftse for many months, I was in fact relating
to a new “personality” in the A$. The way it wiggled unhinged my Ftse derived
sense of safety (without knowing so).
I don’t recall
how long this went on for as I have no record of it in my trading journal,
simply because I wasn’t aware of it to write anything down. In casting my mind
back, I would say that most of last year was spent being uncomfortable with the
A$. I had come to like the notion of a market with its previous day’s highs and
lows, open and close. All very neat it feels.
Then over the
break time something very interesting took place. A few days before Xmas, I was
out walking and rolled my ankle on the edge of a pathway. At the time it seemed
just a simple strain. About 24 hours later, my ankle looked like a balloon,
with a very painful knee as well. The outcome was that I spent around 2 weeks
being quite immobile and very home bound.
I had planned to
not look at charts during this time, so as to have a break and freshen up for
the New Year. Instead, to combat boredom, I did very little else but….yes you
guessed…..look at charts.
To inject some
newness into this enforced lay-up, I chose to do some investigation and branch
out into some other currency pairs, working out zones and seeing what then
transpired based on the trading plan. Part of the reason for this is that I
have wanted to find a market in which to trade during the daytime here. Given
that I am in the Asian session during this time, then price action can be very
(very) slow and tried to find the better preforming pairs during this period. By
the time that DT got back online in January, I had logged up lots of hours on a
couple of forex pairs. So much for the trading break!
In an interesting
reversal, I now find myself rather disconnected to the Ftse and its personality
and the A$ seems far more familiar to me. The only reason that seems plausible
is that due to the many hours spent looking at the forex market over the Xmas
period, that I have now shifted my identification to the A$. I have truly come
to see that each market has its unique characteristics and what that author was
meaning by becoming a specialist (thou far from it I need to say).
The only way to
know a market, as far as I can see, is to spend many hours engaging with it. It
was I feel a really great exercise to go thru, firstly because I can see that I
have gained a level of understanding and secondly, I have enough experience now
to be able to discern the different qualities that each market has.
The other aspect
to this is that because of my initial YouTube training, lurking in the back of
my mind was this constant…… “What about all the other markets”. This thinking
was constantly dispersing my attention that I was “missing out on something”,
which was completely incorrect.
I feel that the
best way to describe this is through that old chestnut….. “It’s about quality
…not quantity”.
Amazing what a
bung ankle can do!
Till next time
T-model.
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