I'm a complete novice and my experience over these first few months certainly bears out some of the comments you've received. My 'edge' as a novice is I recently watched a lot of Peters videos.. One in particular comes to mind where Peter talks about testing strategy hopthesis out. A/B Testing. To prove you're current conclusion set up conrary trades to prove or disprove the conclusion. One thing that draws me to trading is analysing my own activity, approach, choices visavee results. I truely don't know my own attitudes to risk related situations but I am already finding Trading is proving an insightful mirror and self-teacher. One self-discovery is, I recognise a valuable lesson (e.g. I trade an event on betfair I can't watch and inevitably have a loss) and then I seem to have to repeat that mistake several times before I really understand what it means as a trader to 'not-trade' an event. I'm starting to set myself minimums. Standards I will do go below. And the flip side is I trade positively more often when I watch the event I'm trading compared to trading negatively more often when I don't watch the event.
What contrary trade can you run in parallel to prove or disprove your current strategy? Could you do the same trade in a different in-play market. Or a loosing trade strategy in this market to see if you get more greens, or any other A/B tests you can think of... Please share if you do?
I believe it relates to being in the stage between conscious competence and unconscious competence.
What I noticed is that when everything is fine, I'm scanning the market and making lots of mini assessments and decisions, which have a subtle, but significant impact on my entries.
After a big loss, I stop doing this, I start focusing on making money, staring at my bets without thinking, losing awareness of the market.
What has helped is to make my rules and processes more explicit (since I never defined most of them) and in these moments follow them even more rigidly. I'm still less effective, but more importantly, I don't make so many losses from poor entries.
When I'm in the zone, I can be flexible and still pull it off, because I have enough awareness. When I'm not, pushing the boundaries always ends in a loss.
