And please @ wangwang, never mind the n'er do wells @ Big Mike and @ Fat Tails. They apparently mistook your difficult experiences and sincere request for help as an opportunity to have some fun at your expense.

surly

It is true that we made a bit of fun of the original request, but this does not mean that we did not take it seriously.

Trading is a risky business and the psychological part is the most difficult to master. It is as easy as a mouse click to pull the trigger and nobody protects you from yourself. Discipline is a question of first unlearning bad habits, then developing new habits which are appropriate for the specific task.

Tools can faciliate the transition. I have checked NinjaTrader. Within an automated strategy it is possible to calculate the profit and loss or the number of trades executed for the current trading day and stop the strategy, if the positive or negative target is reached. However, it does not seem as easy to collect the profits and losses of all trades that were entered during the current trading day from an indicator.

GetAccountValue(AccountItem.RealizedProfitLoss) can only be used within a strategy.

So the only thing that is really usefull is to work through the books by Brett Steenbarger, who gives a detailed description of the unlearning and learning process. Recommended read is his book "Enhancing Trader Performance".

Thanks for your kind efforts! Is there anyway to calculate the number of lost trades on a certain instrument such as EURUSD? Then Ninja generates an alert message or interrupts the next trade. Is this can be done via indicator? Just curious.

Hey Guys,

I just wrote an email to NinjaTrader and figured out this might be an interest to fellow Ninja users. I have been trading currency using Price Action for about two years. My average winning rate is about 70% but I am not making the more money that I am supposed to make. One of the biggest reason for that is I am not following my rules especially on risk management. For example, my rule says "No more trades for the day upon two losses a day!". However, once I lose a couple trades (especially the one that I just increased trade size), I have a tendency to break my rule easily. Thus either I make a losing trades several times consecutively (fighting bloody hard against trend) or increase stoploss so that I end up getting several times bigger loss than normal. This may sound familiar to some fellow traders, I guess.

Yesterday (Oct 20, 2011), when EURUSD gained more than 300 pips, I made that mistake and fed up with my self. I contacted Ninja and asked for whether there is any tool which can enforce our disciplines. For example, we can set a certain dollar amount of loss or a certain numbers of losing trades. Upon the criteria filled, Ninja automatically limits the next trade displaying alert message. Users have to manually modify the criteria before resuming trading. Upon an alert message, users get a chance to enforce their disciplines more effectively. Ninja said they don't have this function installed yet but it is sitting on future consideration list. I asked the customer support to forward my email to upper management so that they know there is at least one more Ninja user who want it badly.

Somehow if any of you want this function to be installed asap, would you send email to Ninja so that they place higher priority upon this matter? If you know there is any platform which has this function, please let me know also. Thanks for reading!

Wang,

As someone who has suffered from lack of discipline let me advise you to fight fear with fear.

When we fail to follow our trading rules (like quit after 3 losing trades) we are doing so because of fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of being seen as a trading failure. Fear of never reaching our dreams. Fear of sitting on our deathbed wishing we had not washed up as a trader. Yeah...that kind of fear.

How do you combat this? An alert might be nice. Getting your broker to shut you down is another way to handle it. However, you haven't actually fought the fear yourself. You have delegated it to a computer program or your broker. You can always bypass these by ignoring the indicator or calling your broker and telling them to bypass your risk threshold. The logical you wouldn't do that. But when fear takes hold of a person they aren't logical. You become a monkey. Do not let the monkey win.

You've got to fight fear with greater fear. It has been proven time and time again that as a whole people fear public speaking/ostracism more than death. That's some powerful fear. When I was regularly breaking my risk threshold I made a deal with my wife. She saw my broker statement at the end of the day. If I lost more than $X or took more than X trades she got an expensive piece of jewelry. Like 2X the amount I lost expensive. That came from my brokerage account. To cap it off she would brag to her friends/family what an idiot I was because I couldn't follow my trading system I had to buy her expensive jewelry. My friends/family still think I'm crazy for trading but I don't exceed my daily limits anymore. Fear of public ostracism works.

Right now I have a new challenge. I told my coworker that he and I will have a contest in May to see who has the best washboard abs (currently I am fat but not obese while he is rip). Whoever loses has to wax (both of us are hairy guys) and wear a mesh shirt to work. I've been on my new diet for a month and haven't even contemplated breaking it because I'm scared as hell to get waxed and have my beer belly mocked in public.

Make yourself accountable to someone you trust and who has the motivation to keep you on track (like my wife benefiting when I lost too much $, or my coworker who will have to wax if he doesn't win). Building discipline is something you have to work toward and the best way I've found is to find something worse that will happen to you if you fail to be disciplined.

Good luck.

Edward