Charts on our screens are like a hot, curvy blonde combing her hair on the Loreley rock. The curves want to be observed, admired and stalked with action, we think. Like the sailors on the river Rhine in medivial Germany traders fall for such beautifully fatal distractions.
Compulsive behaviour, better known as stalking for trades, just because an opportunity presents itself, is the most dangerous situation in trading. It leads to destraction. Resisting impulsive action is difficult, but it is a tool every trader needs to learn.
To master the tool we need to develop and fine tune skills, such as being present when and where needed and being non-judgemental on free of emotions in the moment of decision. No bias or opinion shall intervene in finding the trading setup – just information.
In order to keep myself from over-trading based on impulses and obsessive compulsive behaviour (need/urge to trade) I created this blog on arlin.com. No, not really to publish publicly, but to help myself. This blog here is my platform for documenting all my trades. My rule is: Unless I have already documented a trade on this blog I will not enter another trade. Each and every trade has to be carefully written down, described and presented with a screenshot, before I can move on. I used to trade way too much and after a day of work I could hardly remember what I had done. It disabled my learning process and caused losses that I wasn’t able to avoid. No matter what I did, I just could not stay consistent due to impulsive overtrading.
Now, that I have started this blog about my trades, I am trading a lot less and I am more focussed on making by trades work. The amount of daily trades went from over 100 to less than 10.