Forex Trading Strategies - No Reservations

No Reservations

Unlike my partner I am no foodie. I am not on the first name basis with Harold from Perilla, I don’t know the coolest new bistro in town and I never consult Yelp for my dinner selections. And although I like a fine meal once in a while and can cook a few Italian dishes with the skill of a pro, I’d much rather enjoy the warm comfort of a grilled cheese sandwich and fries than some tiny slice of lamb drenched in a puddle of raspberry reduction.

I do however love Anthony’s Bourdain’s No Reservation’s show on the Travel channel. In fact I have every episode he ever made saved into my Itunes library on my computer and I often watch them over and over. Not only do I like Bourdain’s snarky attitude, his wonderful ear for the English language and the show’s award winning cinematography, but I also appreciate the mad, obsessive-compulsive characters that populate the show.

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On paper the trade looked like a well planned, well analyzed event risk scalp that yielded 50 quick points in a matter of minutes. In reality it was a typical clusterf* of a news trade with most people in the chat room banking just 35 points of the move.

That’s no easy task and is one of the reasons why trading is such a challenging discipline. In all the time I have traded I have never been able to solve this problem to my complete satisfaction, but I have come up with a practical workaround. I divide my trading capital into two accounts. I have a small account where I allow myself to be as emotional and experimental as I want to be and a large account in which I trade only the well worn strategies that I have tested.

People who cook food almost universally do it for passion rather than money. To achieve the perfect pizza dough, the perfect steak, the perfect risotto you never think about profit margins, efficiency protocols or labor savings. You think about ingredients, presentation, texture and taste. To be a great chef is to seek but never quite attain perfection and therefore to practice the Greek ideal for living a truly satisfying life.

To watch the guests on No Reservations is to marvel at how completely absorbed and content they are in their profession despite its clear physical and emotional challenges. No cubicle ennui here. No middle management angst. People in the restaurant business are happy in the deepest sense of the word because they have passion and purpose.

Surprisingly enough many traders share the same attributes. After all trading is an unbelievably frustrating and emotionally draining task that requires constant concentration and enormous will power to succeed. No matter how much you plan, no matter how well you analyze, no matter how well you time your entry, markets can trip you up and stop you out at any given moment. Yet most of us are completely obsessed and passionate about taming the beast. Although trading is ostensibly about making money, what actually drives traders every day is the intellectual challenge of figuring out what comes next. The art of a well executed trade is as pleasing as the profits it brings.

Whether they’ve had a winning or a losing week I’ve never once heard a trader moan, “Oh no! It’s Monday, I don’t want to go to work!” In fact for most hard core traders the week-ends is a nuisance that stands between them and the markets. Jack Schwager in his seminal book Market Wizards about the golden days of pit based trading, notes that most of the Chicago traders he interviewed could not wait for Monday to start. How many other professions inspire such intensity?

Very few.

Which is why just like true restaurateurs, traders never have any reservations about their chosen craft despite its relentless challenges.

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