Untangling That Spaghetti

#trad­ing­forex #forex #FX #day­trad­ing #trad­inglifestyle #day­trader­life

For those that have been fol­low­ing my process know that I’ve recent­ly had a bad month and half. In order to cre­ate order in the chaos that was my brain I set out to focus on improve­ment. In this process I had to cat­e­go­rize what I did right and wrong. What do I know and what do I still need to work at. What it boils down to: untan­gling the spaghet­ti that had tak­en occu­pan­cy of where my brain used to be. Here I’ll take you through my thought process on how I went about doing this.

Get Back to Basics

First I had to under­stand what was going on and why I wasn’t func­tion­ing well. I’ve embar­rass­ing­ly doc­u­ment­ed all of that in pre­vi­ous posts so won’t be get­ting into that here again. When tak­ing a lot of dif­fi­cult con­cepts all at once you risk to not ful­ly under­stand any of them. Hence you need to take the time to ful­ly grasp one con­cept and then move on to the next. Now, I am a quick-learn­er. But deal­ing with intri­cate unknown con­cepts is already hard to do when func­tion­ing well. So a point came to make a deci­sion. I decid­ed to take charge: Orga­nize the knowl­edge I had taken. 

My Pre­ferred Spaghet­ti Untan­gling Tools

• OneNote for col­lect­ing pieces of infor­ma­tion here and there in a some­what cat­e­go­rized format. 
• Sim­ple­Mind, mind map­ping soft­ware. With this I can visu­al­ly rep­re­sent bits and pieces of infor­ma­tion and at the same time con­nect when there is an over­lap with oth­er concepts. 
• Tech­smith Cap­ture for tak­ing screen­shots and notes. 

Col­lect­ing of data

Now, not every­one learns in the same way. So my way might not be for you. My approach seems more scat­tered to most but it all makes sense in my head. I have always been doing a mil­lion things at once that seem unre­lat­ed to some. But for me it just works like this. Being in the men­tor­ship pro­gram I have access to a por­tal which is web-based. Infor­ma­tion that I gath­er there or any­where else on the inter­net I copy paste into OneNote. What this does next to tak­ing the note is that it pro­vides a link to the source as well. You can do this from any web-based source. This way I can go back to the page and read any oth­er rel­e­vant con­text if need­ed. Hav­ing col­lect­ed bits and pieces of infor­ma­tion that I already gen­er­al­ly cat­e­go­rized, I now have a col­lec­tion of knowl­edge if you will. 

The Untan­gling

This is where mind map­ping comes into play. You might use some oth­er method that is okay. I like to have a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the ‘mess’ in my head. So that then I can move things around. Place them under a dif­fer­ent cat­e­go­ry. Com­bine or link cat­e­gories. I start off by cre­at­ing a Cen­tral Theme. In this case “Untan­gled Spaghet­ti” 🙂 Under­neath I cre­ate sub­sets like price action, order flow, trad­ing loca­tions, entry/exit meth­ods etc. Which then gets filled up with its own sub­set of rel­e­vant data (that I gath­er from OneNote) until they become too big (or clut­tered) and I sep­a­rate them from the ‘main’ cen­tral theme to become its own cen­tral theme (lit­tle cen­tral theme grow­ing up so quick). And tadaaa…. You now have a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your knowl­edge base. When­ev­er I get a new piece of infor­ma­tion I add it to my mind maps and done. 

Now that’s all good and dandy Sir but uhm… we done?

Not quite. Obvi­ous­ly, with learn­ing any dif­fi­cult con­cept, you need to put the knowl­edge to prac­tice and cre­ate new neur­al net­works. First part for me is to get a con­scious under­stand­ing of the mate­r­i­al. Then go out and use the mate­r­i­al to gain expe­ri­ence but above all con­fi­dence. Anoth­er way for me to reaf­firm the learned mate­r­i­al is by writ­ing my Dai­ly Report Cards (DRC). In this I judge myself on if I fol­lowed my process regard­less of if I made any mon­ey. Mon­ey is sec­ondary, process is all. I’m not going to explain here how exact­ly I do my DRCs because they are pret­ty straight for­ward and you can find all of mine here for free. To accom­pa­ny the DRC I take a screen­shot (which I already have from each trade I take) and I go over what I did right. Again rep­re­sent­ing it visu­al­ly. Reaf­firm­ing the knowl­edge I have. But just as impor­tant I include what I did wrong. Here is an exam­ple of all the intri­cate details I include in my screenshots:

Hope you can under­stand the humor 🙂 Last­ly, I track the con­di­tions of my DRC in what I call a track­ing sheet. Was I right in my hypoth­e­sis? Was there an oppor­tu­ni­ty and did I take the trade? Good stuff like that. So that at the end of each month I have sta­tis­tics on all the oth­er rel­e­vant stuff that in the end hope­ful­ly tran­spire into a pos­i­tive P&L. And if not… you have a pret­ty good idea on where you still need work.

If you have made it all the way through… Here is a FREE LAMBO!!! 

Sor­ry no Lam­bo. Nonethe­less, I great­ly appre­ci­ate your inter­est in my jour­ney. I’m sure it is not an easy read as I tend to get long-wind­ed. If you have any com­ments or sug­ges­tions feel free to let me know. Even though I do like writ­ing I don’t con­sid­er myself to be much of a writer. I rather talk or play online games 🙂 If you haven’t already please check out my Twit­ter or instagram

• Twit­ter
• Insta­gram