I sit overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, after two cartoons of watermelon and a long morning run. In the middle of a family commitment I am on a non-vacation vacation. Tim Ferris would not be so happy with me as I have started my eating with fructose overload. One of my new favorite guys ripped off an email to me last night:
JBL- Just finished watching tape on the open
– also noticed that if you watched it without a fixation on the 60c level and simply used the tape (keeping the level in the back of your head, perhaps for you level of conviction), it was extremely straight forward.
Rewind 24 hours and I stood in our SMB Training Room talking JBL on the open. I said,”If you go back and watch your tape you will see that the market is not that fast.” The market feels so much faster when you are in a trade. When you watch back tape of your trading you recognize the market is not that fast. Trading is more straight-forward than we sense it is mid-trade.
Is this because you want your trade to work for you so much? Does our ambition to succeed harm our results? That extra energy spent wishing plays tricks with what is really going on on your trading screens? I will leave that for Douglas and Kiev and Steenbarger. I have observed this from my years of trading. Watch back some tape of your trading and compare how you felt during the trade with what was actually happening as you play back your tape.
Mike Bellafiore
Author, One Good Trade
2 Comments on “Is the Market Slower and Easier than You Think?”
Fear causes two things.
1 Distorts what you are looking at
2 Causes your focus to narrow
When you are a beginner, it makes the level two look like, (been said a million times), a train wreck.
Most of us that have day traded for a long time can remember that feeling of looking at the level two and a one minute chart when we started.
I once read a post by a swing trader that said a three minute chart looked like a train wreck to them. I thought it was funny, but I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.
Thanks Bella, it is always good to be reminded of this and see if it is affecting our trading. I know it still does with mine and I have been doing this for quite a while. Particularly when you are day trading there is a lot of noise in the market that you must always try to ” see”.