As I surf the financial/trading blogs which interest me, I occasionally read something which catches my interest enough that I want to reproduce it here. Often, it is something which I have adopted and found helpful, or applies to an area of my personal deficiency with regard to trading.
I found this at onlythemomo.blogspot.com , MarketMonkey's Tuesday, October 20th blog post. These are two quotes from Dr. Alexander Elder.
"Do you have a statistically proven edge? If so, why would you get angry/upset about any influence luck has had on any series of trades?"
and,
"Fear of pulling the trigger is warranted when you don't have an edge...fear of NOT pulling the trigger is necessary when you have one"
These caught my eye because I recognize that I have no statistcally proven edge. No edge: In my opinion, that is the reason why I cannot advance to the next step. I take a trade and I have no calculated idea of what will happen. I haven't documented/ formulated the probabilities of success of my ideas about trading entries and exits. It is true that one does not have to quantify an idea for it to work. But, it seems that in my case where I don't have the time to "hang-out" and get the "feel" for trading that it would make sense to measure the odds of success. Over the next few months, I intend to keep track of some things and see how they prove out.
