the danger of complexity

One aspect of trading that caught me by surprise was its danger of complexity.

I had studied materials that had warned me about not getting caught in the idea that, for whatever reason, prices in a market might rise to make irrational trading decisions in that market-even subconscious ones. Consequently, I have daily routines to step into market analysis with a neutral mind.

I had studied materials that had warned me about not trading at a time of divorce, death within the family when moving, when sick when fighting with the wife, and kicking the dog in the morning, ...

Consequently, I installed self-evaluation regimes that I check various times daily before trade execution.

I had studied materials that had warned me about not trading underfunded and the complexity of how money management can have a massive influence on the smoothness of one's equity curve, and how differently leverage instruments need different ways of handling.

Consequently, I built complex mechanisms that adjust the trading size according to the trading instrument and trading environment to ensure risk control all the way to have indicator settings adjusted to various daily range and volatility levels.

Yet where I got majorly blind-sighted was the principle that managed complexity is vulnerable to any and all changes-even the minutest ones.

Trading is a reflection of yourself, and You change all the time.

You learn and expand and look at the market every day differently. You might add a new indicator or see a trend differently by changing a trendline.

You might be influenced by your last trade or a book you read.

If you are a pilot and sideways winds come into play, and you need to adjust your tail flaps. This action, in consequence, requires the pilot to change the wing flaps or the plane nose dives, and as such, thrust has now to be adjusted as well, and on and on it goes.

This means I often found myself after even a tiny change in my trading system of a tool hip pocketed or even just some new insights that creep unwantedly to the forefront, a heap of trouble that the whole thing got wobbly or fell apart and how to go back?

With computers, you can go back to a fixed restore point in the past if installing new software caused significant troubles. Still, in this case, you often don't even know if the market behavior changed or whatever else reason for the newly arrived problem is the cause.

The best advice I can have is to have a consistently monitored, updated, and aware log of your system build, your processes, and rules and have sch4eduled visits just like a business plan maintenance to not shift off into a constantly manipulated trading system and execution development that is subconscious and as such useless in a counterintuitive environment.

Write down an active personal journal, a trading journal, an execution journal, and any changes you actively implement to all aspects of your trading.