The last message about helicopter parenting your trades struck a nerve with several readers.
Here’s a way to get rid of your over-involvement in your trades.
Continue trading as you normally do, but…
For each trade where you intervene and override your plan, create a tag called “Overrode” (or even “Helicopter” lol) and apply that tag to these trades in your trade journal (you ARE keeping a database of your trades, right? Right?!?)
Let some time go by and be honest and consistent in applying the tag.
After a while, filter your journal on this tag and compare the results to a baseline (ideally a backtest, but it doesn’t have to be.)
You’ll very likely see that the trades with this tag underperform the others.
That is, the trades where you intervene and override your plan are worse.
This makes it very clear that there’s a cost to your meddling with your trades.
When you see this in such stark terms, it becomes highly motivating to change the behavior.
But what if your helicopter parenting improves those trades?
That’s a great problem to have – and one that I’ll address tomorrow.
-Dave
