I started this journey in 2015.  I really believed everything I saw Dennis doing.  I did the Hurst Course Tutoring, KATS course, TICK course then towards the end of last year (2016), I had so much theoretical knowledge but it wasn’t useful for me, because I thought I couldn’t use it.

I really wanted to get trading real time real money and much earlier than anticipated, just after the first session, I did start trading and I was trading successfully.  Through the year I have been successful.  I have been trading on the GBP, Dow, Gold, VIX and AUD.  It started off well and continued well.

I stopped trading because I decided to give priority to the TAC course.

Real time real money trading was profitable. However, I needed to be totally switched on, and the consequent analysis and phasing of multiple markets took up a considerable amount of time.

TAC was excellent and also required a considerable amount of time.
I found I couldn’t do justice to both.

I decided to focus on TAC and stopped all real time real money trading. I figured that the markets would always be there, and by successfully completing TAC I would be a better trader in future and more than make up for short term income profits I may forgo.

I did encounter psychological issues whilst trading but this was not the reason I stopped trading.

There is a lot of work in this course.  If I hadn’t done the work, I wouldn’t believe it and wouldn’t have the confidence to trade.

One of the things we did was use 100% stop loss using SDKM.  I didn’t ever disbelieve Dennis, but once I re-did the back testing using 50% I saw the great benefits from it.  If I hadn’t done that, just like the work, I wouldn’t have the confidence now.  There was a lot of work to do the back testing of 6 years and forward testing of 6 years.

I made TAC my top priority and stopped trading for a period of time due to time constraints. When I resumed it was on a single market only, the DOW, rather than multiple markets as done previously. This arrangement was more manageable at that stage of my development.

In the course we had two markets, the one we voted on which was the GBP, and my second market was the Dow.  I wanted to theoretically do this and follow Dennis’ guidance, which was to get your market and do back testing, three lots of forward testing, paper trading and then real time real money.  So, I followed that through on the GBP.  I stopped trading and am doing the paper trading now and it is going very well.  I am trading real money with the Dow which was my second market.

The course exceeded all my expectations and it was fantastic.  Now I have done this course I have started trading and I believe in it.  That I can do it.  I had all the knowledge before but I couldn’t do it.  I have been a successful trader this year and I am real pleased I did the course.

Was it the Trading Advanced Cycles course that you put it down to, would you say?

Yes, if I didn’t do that I could have read all the notes again, but I would probably be in the same situation as I was last year.  It was confidence.  I had lots of knowledge, but this course really pulled it together for me.  I was a professional course goer without actually starting to trade.

I wouldn’t have been able to do all this if I didn’t have the background and knowledge.  So, it came at the right time for me.

I think it is the back testing that makes you feel like you are in the market.  It shows you bar by bar.  It is like every day, but you can speed the process up by not waiting one day for the information as you would do if you were paper trading.  So that sort of gives you the insight into how the market behaves and the ‘gotchas’ that can get you.

In live trading, you have FLDs being updated daily, when you look at the market in the morning the bars have come in overnight.  Things have changed.  Are you still going in the right direction?  Are we now coming into a low?

Just by looking at a market chart, you don’t get the feel for it until you are paper trading or you are back testing and then I think that helps you get a feeling for the market.  The real feeling comes in when you have the real money on the line and you wake up in the morning and you go WWWHAT???

The experience you get is watching a market come in to a low and then watching it lift out.  You learn patience to just wait for a cycle to finish, if you are going to go long, or vice versa.  I find in some of the markets I have been paper trading, the currencies, when they have a low they lift out significantly.  Like for three or four weeks they lift out and the bars are really big and you think this thing is not going to go down and then it will turn and go down, just like it is meant to.  It is amazing how it behaves.  It is like clockwork in lots of cases.

I like phasing up a chart and letting it go for a few months, and then coming back to it to see how it has behaved and going oh wow, that has behaved how I thought it would, or, wait a minute, I’ve got something wrong there.  I try and stick to the markets that are working for me, rather than persisting with something that’s just not working.

I must acknowledge the great benefit of Dripper.  It brings in one bar at a time, as if you are facing a real market.  There is no hindsight.

It is like real time, because you have to phase real time too.  So, you not only have to take care of trading real time, but you’ve got to keep your phasing up real time.  That is fabulous practice for what has to happen in paper trading and in real time trading.

The down side, of course, is that Dripper will give you a bar every time you ask, whereas with paper trading and real time trading you have to wait 24 hours, or longer over weekends for the next bar.

One of the points I made in the course was that you are allowed to be excited in the plan development process, doing back testing and doing forward testing.  That is where the joy can come.  But when it comes to real time real money, NO!  Trading is just like having a bag of marbles, and in that bag, you’ve got a set of probabilities that you have established from your back testing and forward testing and paper trading.  You just take a trade, and one of the trade results based on the probabilities come out.  You just keep on taking the trades.

If you liked what those probabilities gave you in the past, as long as you keep taking those trades, in other words as long as you keep following your plan, that is what you should get in the future, with some variance, of course.  The future is never going to be exactly the same as the past but the past is indicative.

But it becomes dull and boring, trading.  So that’s why, while you are waiting for the next bar to come in, most people who understand this process, are off doing another market or off doing another plan.

Also, the thing about this plan from Trading Advanced Cycles, just because it was developed on the GBP doesn’t mean that it can’t be applied to other markets.  So, you don’t have to develop a new plan, you just have to adjust it for another market.  If the plan was cycle related, well okay, these are the cycles that the plan was developed on this market for, what are the equivalent cycles over here, leave the structure of the plan alone and test it.  If it works, test it again and test it again.  If it proves up on the other market, hell, you have saved a lot of development time and so instead of one market you’ve got a plan running on two markets.

You can start to run into correlation issues then.  If both markets are moving in the same direction, well you might as well just double up on one market.  So, ultimately to get your portfolio together, you want markets that are not in-step completely or out-of-step completely.

The main thing is to get people to a point where they are actually trading.  The rest of it becomes part of the journey for the rest of your trading life.  You never stop learning.

To get a proven profitable plan, it did take a lot of work over 6 years, 6 years, 6 years of testing.

We also covered position sizing which I knew not much about, including psychology.  It was great to work though this in practice.

How much time did you spend during the course?

It took me 4 to 6 hours per year to do the back or forward testing.

The course takes a minimum of one hour per day.  That is 7 hours per week or about a day a week.

Did you do an hour a day or did you do the testing in blocks of time?

If I was on a roll I would just keep going.

One thing that took time was keeping the phasing up to date.  Often, an hour was not enough to sort it out.

Also, we started off with Plan#1 and had to redevelop it into Plan#2.  That took extra time.

There is no point in starting off with a plan that is 100% perfect.  Everybody who puts a plan together, puts together what I call a ‘shit’ plan for a start.  You have got to come back around.  You have to listen to the market and you have to improve those components that are not working.  The market will tell you that.  You get to know that.  That’s experience.  Part of the reason for having a six month course was so that people could do the doing.  Learn from the doing.

When Plan#2 came around, there was a clear advantage to have a group of people to share the work.  There was group-think.  There wasn’t just one person trying to make this happen.  There was a group of people to bounce things off.  I think that was an advantage.

Regarding phasing using Dripper, you would fall into a procedure of ‘click’ get a bar, move on, another click, another click, another click.  Suddenly, you would find everything has gone wrong with the phasing.

The question was always what has gone wrong?  The answer was always: the phasing.  In my case I was tending to race on, get on, get the work done.  But you have to stop and reevaluate, if not every bar, every week’s worth.  You’ve got to come back and keep reassessing how that all fits into your weekly phasing and monthly phasing.

As Dennis says, it’s about your psychology.  You’ve got to get your thinking right about what you are doing.  You have got to be patient.  You have got to be constantly looking at, and thinking about, what’s going on.  Come back, work around, no there’s something wrong there, go back, keep researching, instead of just charging through the work, which is what I tended to do.  You have just got to keep questioning.

So, my situation at the moment is I am not out there trading, but I am doing the paper trading.  I feel quite confident in what I am doing with just watching it.  Some days it only takes five minutes to sit down and see that is where I expected it to go.  But then sometimes, that’s not quite what I was expecting.  What might be going wrong?  That might take an hour or two.

Both of these guys who did the Trading course have used the word ‘confidence’.  When you have a good grounding as far as the theory is concerned, and when you have been through this process, THAT develops confidence.  Ultimately, you have to move away from being an analyst, which is what you are doing up to the point where you put real money on real time.  To be a trader, you have to trade.

One of the problems is analysis paralysis.  All you do is stare at endless charts, phasing endless charts, doing testing and all the analysis stuff, but you are not across the line and trading.  Trading is a ‘different hat’.  You have all seen the three silly hats I use in Advanced Cycles.  You have to put the trader’s hat on.  But you can’t put the trader’s hat on until you have got confidence in your knowledge, in the development and testing process and ultimately, in yourself.

It is a bit like getting in the car the first time.  Remember when you got in the car the first time when you got your license BY YOURSELF?  You weren’t overly confident.  There was nobody next to you.  You knew what to do, but you just didn’t feel super confident.

With trading, that is something that has to be overcome.  The only way to do that is to get in the car and drive by yourself.  Or, as Frank did, get in the market and do some trading.  What that does, is it continues to build the confidence through the fact that you gain trust in yourself.

The first thing you do is you bugger up the plan.  I don’t mean you muck up the plan, you just don’t follow it.  You go and do something that is not in the plan.  You have to catch yourself.  You have to say to yourself, come on I know this is a bag of marbles, and if I change the plan I change the fact that I have proven it profitable.  So, I have to stick to the plan.  So, you go through the process of learning to trust yourself.  Ultimately you get to a point where you just ‘do’.  It is the same as when you got in the car to drive here tonight.  You didn’t think about the red lights you had to stop at.  You didn’t think about changing gears or putting the brakes on etc..  That’s the way it becomes as a trader.

When you have a proven profitable plan, you know what to do.  It is like David said, a five minute day.  It is what I call a three second day.  You look at the market, there is nothing to do and you say to yourself what am I going to do now?

Confidence is the key, and I am pleased to hear they both mentioned that because when you know what to do, you develop confidence.  The next level is trust in yourself.  That is, you ARE going to follow the plan.

The other thing I’d say is you never stop learning.  That’s a part of the reason I insist on coming here.  There are other ideas around you can bounce around and sometimes you are reminded of the old ideas.

I would like to know more about Dripper

Dripper comes with the Trading Advanced Cycles course.  It is no use to you if you don’t know what to do with it.  It is really useful, but it by itself is really useless.  It is a bit like CycleMaster is useless if you haven’t got Advanced Cycles behind you.  So, Dripper is not going to change your life.  What has the potential to change your life is, and there are two guys here who have done it, and that is Trading Advanced Cycles which utilises it.

How is Dripper used in the course?

Dripper is a python program that takes a bar out of one csv file and puts it into another csv file in MT4.  That bar is then imported into CycleMaster and you run #UpdateCycles.

There are no hand charts!  Most people, though Advanced Cycles, have learned to focus down in to one market.  This business of hundreds of markets is just garbage.  If you can’t get one market to work, and that’s what they did, they worked on the GBP.  How many markets to do you need?  If you had been trading the GBP long for this year (2017), who wants a second market?  I am currently trading four markets and they are on semi-automation.

The beauty about my approach, is once you know what to do, you can go and apply it to a second market and beyond.  You can take THAT plan to another market, or you know how to develop a plan and prove it profitable, and therefore you can have some bright idea, hopefully associated with cyclic knowledge, and you can say I’m going to apply that knowledge, to the same market, GBP, or to any other market.

What I am trying to do is to teach people to fish.  So, these two guys, if their life depended on it, could go and follow this process and come up with another plan.

Dripper is useful because what I used to do was hide the future bars with a sheet of paper and shift it along, shift it along, shift it along.  The problem with that was the phasing was already there, so there was a future leak in what I was doing (I had information I couldn’t know real time).  The advantage with Dripper is that it brings separate bars in and therefore not only do you have to trade it, but you have also got to keep your phasing up to date too.

What David described earlier about updating phasing is no different to what I have tabled tonight regarding my re-phasing of the Dow on the monthly.  You have got to be keeping an eye to the question “Is my phasing correct?”  If it is not, you have got to be making some adjustment.  And that is just the way it is.  That gets to be practiced using Dripper

What I teach is, you develop a plan and lock it in concrete.  You establish that it is a profitable plan and then it becomes dull and boring to trade because there is phasing and “Does my plan say to do something based on this new bar, or doesn’t it?”  If it does say to do something based on this new bar; “What do I have to do?”

When you have got your trader’s hat on with a plan that has been proven profitable and developed in this way.  The trader is almost asleep.  A bit like you at the wheel on your way in tonight!  You are not thinking about it, you are just doing it.  And the doing is following the plan.  With your plan, there is nothing to think about, there are no decisions to make when you are wearing your trader’s hat.  Because if you do step up as a trader and do something different to that plan you are changing the probabilities in the bag of marbles.  You don’t want to do that because of the fragility of those probabilities.  It is not easy to get a proven profitable plan.  If you change the plan, there is a chance it is just going to fall over and won’t be profitable any more.  Therefore, because you have got this experience and you have spent nine months doing this, you don’t dare not follow the plan.

There are phasing decisions.  All of the plan decisions have been made.  The plan is written on an A4 sheet.  Just follow it.

There are people who trade the markets in a very different way to that.  But I teach my process in this course.  It is the only way I have been able to establish consistency.

Another thing that was good about this course was the regular contact.  Meeting every week or every couple of weeks helped to maintain momentum.  Across longer periods of time you can lose track.

The practicality of using cyclic theory is that there is often too much time between the next time you catch up with someone.  It is a bit like school.  You go to school every day and you learn the basics of something and the next day you learn a bit more and so on for a whole year.  Whereas with trading, you practically can’t do that.  You can’t share with others the new bar and say what’s the Dow doing now.  But by having those regular meetings approximately weekly it keeps the momentum up and keeps your brain thinking ’cycles’.  You don’t get distracted and you stay on task.

I have always encouraged people like yourselves to rub shoulders with each other.  I have always said ‘buddy up’.  If you want to meet on a regular basis then do it.  I am still in contact weekly with my trading colleague(s) in Melbourne.  I value that time because we are like minded.  There is continuity.  We take screenshots and talk them through.  That’s valuable.  You guys meet up here, you meet up in my courses, if you wish to form a group, then you just have to say to somebody else, what do you reckon we hook up on some sort of regular basis.  Weekly becomes a routine which maintains momentum.  You might not want to and that’s fine.  Everybody sings the praises of maintaining momentum.  Well, to do that you need to rub shoulders with each other.  Anything longer than fortnightly and it won’t work.  The rubber band snaps.

The only reason it happened for me was because I selected out people I wanted to learn from and who were workers and contributors.  Same as here – contribute when you can.  You get something from everyone else in the group for giving your contribution.  That’s a good multiple!