Nicely done, you've effectively doubled or tripled your bank in 10 days and that's no small feat.
Freezing and fearing for your positions obviously means that you're still uncomfortable managing the size of your positions at times, risk/fear comes from the unknown, if you're aware of every potential outcome and accept it beforehand then there's nothing really to fear. That's why I feel it's important to find that comfortable plateau of staking to make your decision-making as easy and as objective as possible.indigokid wrote: ↑Mon Feb 17, 2020 11:44 amI'd say approximately £1000 of the unprofitable trades were simply the cost of doing business on trades that turned negative in-play and the other £700+ where I hadn't developed the mental flexibility to exit for a loss and dropped the whole lot. I noticed these were usually higher stakes trades where I think fear was probably making me freeze when the in-play momentum had changed to the negative but there was still the off-chance of a goal.
Yeah, probably. Like I've mentioned many times I nearly always prefer quality instead of quantity, at least to begin with, because later once you have some genuine quality in your trading you can easily up the quantity if you wish, that's one way of "scaling up" for sure. Although at the end of the day you are of course limited by the number of opportunities that present themselves, so ultimately you're the one that actually chooses what type of variance you want (or can handle) in your results, you can choose your own results in a way.
Don't think you need any advice? If you're well in profit, then that really is "the right approach".
Mental agility/flexibility is something you can practice through experience naturally, you can try and rationalize it emotionally in many ways but for your trading style it should be pretty simple because it's all based on numbers, so if your trades depend on numbers and prices then it only makes sense that your decisions do as well. You've probably looked at this Psychoff interview, he won't say what type of prices he's looking for but he is able to clearly differenciate between good and bad prices so his decision-making is very easy in a nutshell, that's where the edge comes from. You can always say "there's an off chance of a goal so I'll keep my position", but ask yourself whether there's still +EV in your position or no? You need a clear answer, and based on the answer you can decide what to do with the position.
But also bear in mind that your trading doesn't have to be so one-dimensional and clear-cut with a clear entry here and a clear exit there, if you're unsure you can either get out completely to be on the safe side (ignore FOMO) or manage your position accordingly to how you feel about the trade, that's actually the ultimate test of mental agility that you mention here. I guess I can use a real concrete example from Paulo Rebelo on one of his trades, you use it as a bit of motivation as well as it's probably the biggest trade I've seen on football.
In a nutshell Paulo got this wrong at first and thought there may be a bit of value on the other side, but as the game progressed he completely reversed his opinion and around halftime got heavily involved in this market, because according to the game the price here looked like obvious value. But he managed this position according to how the game was going and depending on how dangerous City actually was, putting stakes in and out and securing a bit of profit along the way, because if +EV changes during a match it only makes sense that your positions change along with it, that's key I feel because your one and only job is trying to be on the positive side of EV, it's not always possible but if half your trades have some sort of +EV then that's enough to show in your results. So to achieve this result, he had to survive a penalty in the end, which he obviously did, but he wouldn't be able to do any of it if he didn't have any mental agility and flexibility.
It's why I mentioned keeping your ego in check, because it will try and stop you from admitting wrong and changing your mind/position. There's a washed out cliche "trade what you see, not what you think", but it's genuine because obviously what you see is always actually real and it makes sense to trade it, while what you think may only be real in your head since you can fall prey to all sorts of cognitive biases (confirmation bias etc).
