Lessons learned from other traders

1.) Lessons learned from Tuesday's CAF

David Hanson pointed 2 very good things to ponder when trading. For those who were not able to attend the CAF last week let me share to you those things, probably not the way he told it, but how I understood it and how it stuck into my mind.

Trade Confidently and Cautiously!

This was an advice David got from a fellow trader (forgot his name): Trade Confidently and Cautiously!
Trading confidently definitely saves you form having second thoughts during trading. For my case, usually second thoughts is one of the reason why I'm either shaken out of a good bullish move or dilly-dallying when to sell on a bearish move. The fact that I had second thoughts means I don't have a very good basis for executing a trade and so I wasn't trading confidently.

While confidence is important in trading, the other side of it, trading cautiously is just as important. Riding the break out or bull run without knowing your possible exits points or "plan B", is just too much confidence, without caution.

Make a business out of your trades

David also suggested to treat trading as if it is a business. Just like in putting up a business, you gotta have a business plan, and for trading, you definitely must have a trading plan.

Just sharing a thing that also stuck in my mind: The usual advise given when attempting to expand a business is to create a system that can be replicated. From my experience, I attempted to grow my trading "business" by increasing my fund. The problem that I encountered was that I didn't have a system that can be replicated in a different scale. The trades that I did in a small scale did not work well when I increased my fund. So creating a system that I could replicate is still a challenge for me. For now, I went back to having a small fund because that is what works well for me for the mean time.

2.) The Double Support Trailing Stop

I also came across a post from nix's blog Lone Voice (http://fromlonevoice.blogspot.com/) about "The Double Support Trailing Stop" by Rob Hana (http://quantifiableedges.blogspot.com/).

I find the post very informative, specially if you need to create a system for trading. It converts your "when to sell" gut feel in a bullish move into a replicable action. And since its replicable, you can back test it to see if it fits you.