Another good one

Finally a day when I handily beat the market averages (going up, that is!). I made a decent 1.62% on 50% invested. I can't believe that I missed the real essence of Van Tharp's book which is developing a trading system with a positive expectancy and sticking to it. I had the whole "never lose more than 1% of your portfolio" thing down, but I lost 1% nearly 20 times before realizing that I was throwing money everywhere hoping to catch a wave in a declining market.

More recently I was trying to jump on as many trades as possible hoping that if I risked less I could benefit from the sheer number of trades I made.

Today I watched the opening and then turned off my browser and did some homework. I saw that the market was down pretty big about an hour after the opening because I have a stock market widget on my desktop. I closed that too. I looked again at the close and was pleasantly surprised.

It's extremely liberating to trust my system and avoid the micromanaging that I've always done. The fear of the unknown has always influenced me to make boneheaded decisions. I've never quite believed the experts who say trading should be "boring". But I'm starting to understand what they mean by that. Boring doesn't mean "unprofitable". It means that you don't let the markets (or the news, or the blogs, or your dad) get you worked up. You stick to the system that you know works, and you ignore all the insanity.