Discretion or Luck?

How to understand if you have just luck or you build the discretion?

I have entered many trades in my trading history. I would say it is way over 1,000 trades, after all I am trading for some time (since 2020, for those who do not know).

I think that you all know that when you enter the trade and everything just feels different. You just feel the trade and that’s what I want to talk about with you today. If you are in my free telegram channel you might have seen my GBP/JPY trade I took there. Live. Everything was sent there and I was just in the flow. The trade was running a lot of days before I closed it, but I just felt it. Ended up closing on 3.1R, because I added the positions to scale even more profit. It was a good trade.

Even though I am not too often analysing the trades after I take them, I try to focus on 100% just entering based on my criteria, discretion while waiting for the lower timeframe PA, I have to reflect on this one.

I am sometimes asking myself, if the trades I manage really well - in my opinion this was exactly that trade - if I am just lucky or really know what I do. To be honest, I do not think I will ever have answer to that, but what is more important - that it simply happened.

I find myself sometimes falling into trap of thinking that I know what I do. I look for certainty, but the reality is that I know nothing about the markets - and probably you know nothing about it too. All we do is that we play with randomness - sometimes it goes well - sometimes it goes wrong. If you have red day it doesn’t mean that you are bad trader, losing month doesn’t necessarily mean that you have bad strategy, BUT losing month can show you that your strategy is not in the best shape now - but it also doesn’t mean that it will not work next year. And on and on.

When your trade goes wrong or well, don’t take it as something you could have influenced - yes I made far more profit on that one trade than I should, but that also doesn’t necessarily mean that I am skilled or good trader. I just got opportunity to add at good prices (in my opinion) and I did that and luckily enough - I wasn’t stopped out.

That trade could have gone to the stop loss, even if I had good feeling about it - that’s just how it is. My feeling about that would be the same - but the outcome would be far different. If you attach too many positive feelings to any doing in the markets, you could end up in very bad space.

Next time you are trading just simply follow your rules and follow your discretion if it is in your trading plan. All you can influence is the pre-trade preparation, analyse as much as you can - the trade management itself is just random. Backtesting will tell you some areas where you have higher chance of succeeding, but after all it is still random. You just give yourself some hope that you have control.

And any feeling control in the markets is just illusion.

Take care.

P.S - those of you who finished the letter, thank you and if you are not in the telegram yet, I think that you are really missing out. It is my personal journal I made public and you can simply find there any trade I am taking in time. So if you want to take a look on someone else who is trying to figure out the markets as you do, join (Telegram) and enjoy. Those of you who don’t care about that, it’s fine too. Love you all.