The Good Follower

I've spent the last eight years of my life studying everything I could about the business of being a financial trader. I've studied almost every discipline, every doctrine, and listened to every finance guru I could and you know what, most of it was complete garbage. I can say that with confidence because I have put my time in, I have seen what doesn't work, I have gone through many tough times, it's cost me tens of thousands of dollars, it's frustrated me to where I wanted to give up, multiple times, and finally, after eight years, I've gotten to a place where I can confidently say I've figured out what works and how to win.

Now this is going to sound very simple and a bit stupid but here is the revolutionary idea. When a market is going up, buy that market. Conversely, when the market is heading lower, sell the market. That's it. That is the revolutionary idea behind greatly increasing one's chances at being right in the game of trading. When one can give up on the notion of "buy low, sell high", he/she is ready to follow the market. That's why I chose this web address. When making decisions in the markets as a Trader, it's good to be a follower; stop trying to be a leader. Trying to be the first one out the gate in the financial markets is suicide, eventually. Basing your decisions on what the crowd is doing is the best way to increase your chances of success. If they are buying, you buy. If they are selling, you sell. Now if you are constantly waiting for a trend to be clearly evident, you are never going to buy at an absolute low or sell at an absolute high, and that's okay. You want to put yourself in a position where you are just trying to take a large piece of the pie, rather than trying to eat the whole thing.

A good follower waits for a trend to be clear, he/she buys or sells in the direction of the trend, and periodically raises or lowers their stop levels towards the current price, to comfortably reduce exposure and eventually lock in profit. Following a market isn't as sexy as picking tops or bottoms, but it's the method that will always prevail as most effective when crunching the numbers over a long period of time.

When testing, looking at my personal trading performance for Crude Oil, trading only one futures contract at a time from Dec 2014 - June 2015, you can see I wasn't exactly right a whole lot. My winning rate was only 41.5%. There was also a period of time where my account lost as much as $4901.83 USD before starting to make money again. I share this because a lot of novice traders feel they need to make money over 50% of the time and if they take more than three or four loses in a row, they need to change their whole approach. As you can see, I had losing streaks of 6 trades in a row at times and still I was able to profit close to $17,000 USD, even after commissions and fees. This is because I would cut my losers short and let my winners run. Simply following the market, not knowing how high or how low it would go, but at the same time, getting in the game and raise or lower the stops until the market itself loses steam and eventually hits that stop.

In the posts to follow I plan to share more information with you by keeping a personal trading journal of sorts, of my method, performance, and tips in order to share the real truth behind financial markets and maybe I'll end up motivating another trader, like yourself, to become a good trend follower.