The first ‘one to one’ session with my mentor from Traders University

I was eagerly looking forward to my first session with my mentor from the TU course that I attended. I have been trading for 3 weeks but have had little success and was beginning to wonder whether the strategy was up to much. However, after my first session with one of the TU mentors, I am back to being very enthusiastic.

He showed me there were quite a few things I have not been doing correctly or thoroughly enough. I do have a tendency to assume that I know best and go off and do my own thing. In this case this was probably not the best thing.

The main points I have not been following are:

Keep my entry points close to the close of the last day so I can get into the trade at the first possible moment. I  was using the ATR(10) to place my entry points away from the last days close. This is not correct. The strategy details placing your stop roughly the ATR(10) away.

Note: (ATR(10) is the average movement of the stock over the last 10 days).

I have altered my orders that are ready to be placed for this weekend accordingly.

Also, I have not been analysing the trend lines and resistance / support lines in accordance with the their strategy. This means most of my trades that have been entered, have not really been up to much as there was less movement to be gained in the trend.

I have some homework to do now which is to analyse 3 trending sectors and pick 3 trending stocks and find all the power plays and pivot plays over the last 2 years for each one. I need to record the number of points each one would have made or lost according to the strategy. This should give me enough experience to quickly identify the entry points and also gauge how much I could win or lose by them. Basically, it will allow me to learn the patterns.

Also my mentor recommended a book by Thomas Myers called ‘A course in Technical Analysis. I will get this and let you know if it is any good.

He also answered some of my questions about calculating the dealer’s spread into your stop and limit positions. The difference in the spread should be negligible compared to the amount won and therefore don’t add the spread difference to your stop loss. This is another good correction for me to make in future.

All in all, I was very impressed with the information from the mentor and he did spend about 50 minutes with me instead of the 30 minutes allocated.
We might even have some business in common between his company and my own, so I am looking forward to see if his company may become a client of ours. (I’ll let you know if anything comes of it)
So, it is still thumbs up for the trader university course so far!

Sorry if this post has been quite technical, but this is a journey to riches and it seems that for this aspect of the journey being technical is called for.