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Strategies & Market Trends : From the Trading Desk -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Carl H. Gotsch who wrote (2436)	1/25/1998 2:29:00 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4969

A lesson which may be valuable for other neophytes. At the end of the year, I sat down and reviewed all my trades in 1997 - the good, the bad and the very ugly. I noted to the penny how much each had won or lost, and ranked the winners and losers for both long and short positions. Then I started counting how many bad trades it took to constitute half my losses; or three quarters of my losses. In each category it was a handful. I suggest sitting down with those trades and staring at them for a while to remind yourself what a &^(*& you were for either getting into them or not getting out fast. I figure stop orders are the discipline needed to avoid that handful in 1998. I don't play for halves or 1/4's and I don't daytrade or watch the tape all day, so my position is different from Coyoti. I play a position for a few days up to a few months. The stop orders keep me in line, when - psychologically - I know I'm not ready to do that for myself yet. P.S. My lesson from a year on SI: whenever you see the word "hope" in a post - especially if you use it yourself - 99 per cent of the time it's a losing position. But hope springs eternal, like weeds.