So I have been trading for around 8 years now.
And I want to compare my old trading to my current trading.
Like, what I valued before, and how that changed after I learned new things, and what I value now after gaining a lot of experience.
I want to compare what I used to focus on before and what I focus on now.
For example, I used to focus on smaller timeframes before.
Nowadays, I focus mainly on 4h and higher timeframes.
It’s not like I have found smaller timeframes bad or anything.
It’s just that when I trade on higher timeframes, I get more freedom to do other things.
Like, when I used to trade on smaller timeframes, such as below 30 minutes, I had to watch the charts more frequently.
I had a rule of taking another trade if the first trade of the day was lost.
This used to result in me sitting in front of the computer looking for the next good trade for hours.
When I trade on higher timeframes, I can analyze the market anytime throughout the day I want.
I don’t have to stick to the screen for hours.
Nowadays, while trading on higher timeframes, I know how many days later I’m going to take the trade or for how many days the current trade is going to last.
This makes me organize other things around those trade entries and exits better.
It’s basically a stress-free trading style.
However, trading on smaller timeframes gave me live market trading experience faster.
So, I’m not going to recommend a beginner trader to stop using smaller timeframes.
I would still trade smaller timeframes if I were starting over.
They helped me learn from experience faster.
The next thing I want to focus on is the number of strategies.
In the beginner days, after trying every strategy out there, I mainly stuck to the support resistance with candlestick entry patterns strategy.
I believe I have made videos on this strategy on the official Trading Rush website.
So, check them out if you want to learn about it.
But I would consider that as 1 strategy, maybe 2 if we consider support resistance and candlesticks as separate.
But nowadays, I have a bunch of entry reasons for different market conditions.
It’s like when a new market condition appears, you learn new things or what works in it, and then you have another strategy that works in that specific market condition.
So, nowadays, I have between 5 and 10 trading strategies in total.
Maybe even higher if I count every little thing.
But remember, even though the number of strategies has gone up, it’s not like I randomly switch strategies.
I look at what the market is offering, and then use a strategy from the list I know works.
Again, I have shared pretty much all my strategies on the official Trading Rush channel and website.
If you are curious about them, check them out there.
The next thing I want to talk about is the focus on strategy vs the focus on what the market is doing.
This can be a little difficult to explain.
Basically, before, I was very focused on taking the right entry, or the perfect candlestick pattern, and things like that.
But nowadays, I’m more focused on why the market is moving like this.
Like, what’s causing the move?
Is it a news move, or a technical reaction from a price level like support resistance, or something else?
Sometimes, there are news events that cause a stock, gold, USD, or bitcoin to move in one direction in the long run.
If I understand why the market is making the move, then I combine that news or whatever reason with the technical strategy and trade in the same direction.
In the beginner days, I was doing none of these things.
But now it’s an important step in my decision process.
The next thing I want to talk about is the frequency of trades.
Before, I was taking multiple trades every single trading day.
Again, that was good to learn from live trading faster.
But after learning a bunch of things, I gathered more variables that say whether a trading setup is good or not worth taking.
With more in-depth analysis of setups, the number of trades I found worth trading went down.
Well, my profit graph went up even though I was trading less.
So, I guess my quality of trades went up as I learned to analyze more.
I have also learned that the market is not worth trading most of the time.
The next thing I want to talk about is the technical vs fundamental focus.
In the beginner days, after trying a bunch of things, I settled down to pure price action trading, like support resistance as mentioned earlier.
I hated indicators because they made things confusing or messier.
On top of that, they never reliably worked.
But after multiple years, I found that indicators do work; I was just not experienced with how and when to use them.
Initially, I was taking every indicator entry.
It took me thousands of hours of live trading experience to understand that indicators mainly work in specific places.
Like, a long indicator entry near a strong support or in a good uptrend.
The rest of the time, indicators just don’t work.
But in the last 5 years, there have been multiple major fundamental events that moved the markets in a big way.
Everything from gold to stocks to bitcoin was affected by these news events.
So, I was basically forced to learn about fundamental analysis.
Well, I was always going to learn about fundamentals after technicals.
But the market said, No, you do it now because I made a big fundamental move.
So, nowadays, fundamental trading reasons are a big portion of my trading decision process.
In the recent market crashes or similar big moves, the fundamental reason to enter was more than 50%.
I believe I talked about this in one of the videos.
So, when I was a beginner trader, it was only technical.
But now, after around 8 years of trading experience, I switch between majority fundamental and majority technical depending on what the market is doing.
Adapting to the market!
That’s all.