Short Term Trading Week Starting: 5th Sept, page-209

Hi @TheGladiator - thanks for your time responding.
Not, not all from HC. Some i see on facebook groups or just commercial knowledge from the fin review or around the place. Hot copper does add some information and as i found out with XPE abit of noise from the cheerleading squad against my better judgement, however sometimes I just find that without a mentor or clear teacher guiding or showing you entry and exits it is abit hard to judge when you made a right decision (as you can't see the alternatives) vs not. For example - there are many stocks that i've either just missed the run, or gotten out and they've run, so I have had my fair shot at bagging prospective stocks. On the other hand stocks where I should have gotten out earlier I held on, and vice versa when i did cut early losses in order to invoke the 'protect your capital' rule you hear about in all books and the like, they would recover or go on to make handsome profits I had been waiting for this whole time.

The hardest part I find is reading all the literature , tips and tricks of those before you - it is obvious to protect your capital, let your winners run etc. but in practice when face with stock price movements one doesn't 'practically' know how to react. I can understand once you have 'experience' under your belt this is all fine, but it's kind of like listening and getting some brief videos on a sport and trying to mimick it, just that subtle difference to someone guiding your arm physically, playing against you and actively mentoring you.

In that sense it almost sounds like I need an actionable trading plan. But that's where the next conundrum starts (sorry think that's mispelt). I just don't know what is 'acceptable'. I.e. if it's a fundamental stock do I set my max threshold before cashing out on a stop loss at cash backing? So taking the example of RDG again as a recent tip, on 13m cash at june 16's financial report on 632m issued equity, do I set a stop loss at 2c? Given it's 4c now and the potential is to go higher, when does one listen to technicals and sell out once support is breached? I guess there are just so many variables and it's hard to make my own set fixed trading or investment plan as I jsut don't know what is acceptable practice. Does one merely flounder around with some set fixed trading/investment rules, only to realise or never realise 5 years later that they don't work? Even then how would you ever know you could have tweaked something better when you don't know what you don't know?

Probably overthinking the theory side of things but I hope you get where I'm coming from. I know people are unlikely to publicly post their trading plan, but one of the things that would be really helpful would be knowing what rules and plans successful people here follow. If one knows this they can generally reverse engineer a similar approach and tweak for what they know? At least that's how I'm hoping success breeds further success and improvement in others by 'seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants'. It is one reason I do like reading some authors such as Colin Nicholson who blatanly share what hard and fast rules they use for setting entry and exit points.

I hope i made some sense in the above? Maybe I am not as disciplined with writing and designing rules down, which I need to do, but hopefully some others have gone through that 'floundering/lost' feel that I have had in their past trading/investment lifetimes, and how they got a feel for knowing what rules were actually right for following. I guess unliek a video game, a bad investment doesn't mean just hitting reset, which is why finding out the hard way can sometimes be debilitating. Especially as you need to work back another year's salary to build up money again. It's not something that can easily be 'practiced' in failure in a quick amount of time. Even then my worry is rather than not being open to improvement, you just don't know any better.

I'm at work now so I will read the post you were referring to when I get off work. Thanks for sharing and educating.

P.S. your right about the exit price from hotcopper. I think the $1 XPE party is still waiting. I would have been better off taking a 3 bagger or so and just getting out at 10c and listening to my logic. Again maybe a sign that i need to have a set and fast trading/investment rule to know when to exit... but understanding price and what is 'fair' is probably the other issue. Maybe if I had a better grasp of valuation or knowing what comparative price a speccy finally gets too overvalued at, I could have slapped myself awake more at 10c and took my money and run at a nice profit.

Contrast that with the falling knives and the old 'trap' of doubling down on the way down... *shakes head*.