{"id":8704,"date":"2014-09-23T08:22:16","date_gmt":"2014-09-23T15:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/?p=8704"},"modified":"2024-03-26T18:32:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T01:32:56","slug":"anatomy-going-tilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/anatomy-going-tilt\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anatomy of Going on Tilt in Trading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8706\" src=\"https:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/going-on-tilt.jpg\" alt=\"going-on-tilt\" width=\"547\" height=\"305\" \/><\/p>\n<p><div class=\"post-aff-notice\">When you buy something through one of the links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>The worst thing that you can do as a trader is to go on tilt.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You start chasing trades instead of letting them come to you<\/li>\n<li>You erase your hard-fought gains<\/li>\n<li>You rationalize bad trades<\/li>\n<li>You cry yourself to sleep at night<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Sound familiar?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But why do we start going on tilt? Most of us know better.<\/p>\n<p>Yet we insist on being stubborn and giving into our animal instincts, instead of relying on our trading training.<\/p>\n<p>When we finally come to our senses, it can be too late and the damage has already been done.<\/p>\n<p>Worse than the monetary damage is the hit we take to our psychological capital.<\/p>\n<p>That can leave us scarred for weeks or months to come.<\/p>\n<p>But how do we prevent this?<\/p>\n<p>There isn\u2019t one blanket answer, but I believe that the best thing we can do is to learn from the experience of others.<\/p>\n<p>That is why books like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/best-trading-books\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Market Wizards<\/a> and the Jesse Livermore biography are so valuable.<\/p>\n<p>They give us a glimpse into what other traders should have done, but didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>So in order to help you learn from my experience, I\u2019m going to explain how I went on tilt late last year.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll get into the details of why I did it, how it affected me and how I stopped it.<\/p>\n<h2>The Cause<\/h2>\n<p>In this case, I got bored.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, that's not really it.\u00a0 If I think about it a little deeper, I was over anxious for results.<\/p>\n<p>My account had not moved past +12% in a long time and I was getting married. There was pressure to perform as well as I knew I could. <strong>I wanted to finally make some real gains in my account so I could start trading for a living.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The pressure wasn't from an outside source, it was completely within.\u00a0 I'm sure you have felt that before.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn't the system's fault, it was obviously net profitable or breakeven at worst.<\/p>\n<p>But I was trying to make the system do something that it obviously wasn't built for.<\/p>\n<p>A horse can only pull a wagon so far before it has to rest.<\/p>\n<p>Production cars currently max out at about 270 mph.<\/p>\n<p><em>Everything has its limits.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Push a system beyond its limits and it starts to break down. This is exactly what happened to me.<\/p>\n<h2>The Result<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/trading-log\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8707\" src=\"https:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/growth-graph.jpg\" alt=\"growth-graph\" width=\"600\" height=\"335\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When I first started tracking my live account in MyFxBook in 2011, I had some outstanding initial success.<\/p>\n<p>My first few trades made 12%, with only one small losing trade.<\/p>\n<p>Then I proceeded to trade between 9% and 12% for quite awhile.<\/p>\n<p>That was frustrating.<\/p>\n<p>But it wasn't surprising.\u00a0 From my backtesting, I knew that there were periods where the system traded flat for some time.<\/p>\n<p>It was profitable overall, but I new what to expect.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, I still insisted on forcing things.<\/p>\n<p>This lead to me going from a little over 12% profit at my high point to almost back to 0%.<\/p>\n<p>The green bars on the graph represent pips made and lost.<\/p>\n<p>You can tell that I was trading poorly because the big losses in pips corresponded to a sharp drop in my profit percentage.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, when you look back at June 2013, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/a-recap-of-my-huge-1095-pip-loss-and-why-it-aint-no-thang\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">I lost 1,095 pips<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This can be seen by the huge green downside bar on the chart above.<\/p>\n<p>But the corresponding loss on the growth graph (red line) was very small.<\/p>\n<p>So let's take a look at what I learned from all of this&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>The Lesson<\/h2>\n<p>I should have kept the current system in place and looked for another system to supplement it.<\/p>\n<p>Or I could have stopped trading it altogether and took some time to find a new trading method.<\/p>\n<p>But I ended up doing the absolute worst possible thing, pushing my system beyond its limits.<\/p>\n<p>In hindsight, I should have stopped trading the system.<\/p>\n<p>If it wasn't showing consistent gains every month, then it wasn't a good candidate for trading for a living.<\/p>\n<p>That is all there is to it. Imagine what the graph above would look like if I had kept the current system in place and just added the second system.<\/p>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>So if you are not getting the results you are looking for, take a step back for a moment.<\/p>\n<p>Ask yourself if you can do one of the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Can you keep your current system in place and just add another one?<\/li>\n<li>Do you need to stop trading your current system?<\/li>\n<li>Do the results of your current system match your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tradingheroes.com\/course\/strategydevelopment\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">backtesting results<\/a>?\u00a0 Did you even backtest?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Hopefully answering these questions will keep you from making the same mistake I did.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went on tilt late last year and it has taken me awhile to come back from it. This post will analyze what I did, what I should have done and how you can prevent yourself from doing the same thing. You will also be able to see my current trading results and I would love to hear about your experiences. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2022,"featured_media":8709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[725],"tags":[838],"class_list":["post-8704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trading-psychology","tag-revenge-trading","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-33"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Anatomy of Going on Tilt in Trading<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This post will show you my trading results after &quot;going on tilt.&quot; I will tell you why it happened, what were the results and how I fixed it.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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