ShaunWhite wrote:I took another thread off topic with an idea..
"I partly blame the way the numbers change from red to green, if that colour change happened at 'acceptable loss' I wonder how much it would affect the psychology of the situation.
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And it made me wonder if having say returns from zero to 'acceptable loss' in amber would really have any psychological effect. Consider it as a virtual stop loss indicator to soften the mental transition from red to green. Right-click on the P/L col to set it?
I must confess to 'chasing the green' in my early days (18 months ago) and this often led me to going in play and needing just a few ticks to get green, rather than accept a red. This led to a number of problems...
1) The 'few ticks' needed to get back green often didn't materialise and I ended up with substantial losses much larger than the green amount would have been.
2) The few ticks did materialise, however the short nature of the race (5 and 6F) meant that the prices had moved before all my green up bets were matched.
I refined a little and started to manually enter the money into the market BEFORE the off so there would be no green up issues and this worked well to address point 2, but still did nothing where the price moved away from what I needed.
In short, I eventually swapped to automation and it ALWAYS greens / hedges up at least 30 seconds before start time. I often have losing trades, but they are most often outweighed by the total of my winning trades, so each EVENT usually has a green or a small red only.
My nerves and balance have thanked me for this stability many times over and I try to learn from the costly mistakes of myself and others hereabouts.
The colouring of amber for perhaps a 5-8 tick spread above and below the entry point I believe would actually have helped me in my early days, though more recently it's irrelevant as I green / hedge on auto.
CS
