Thread by @theBuoyantMan

Learn to listen to the markets and do not impose your own will upon them.

- Linda Raschke.

Every successful trading strategy has the same essential starting point: minimizing risk first, looking to maximize gains only after risk has been defined and controlled.

It is important to initially trade a new concept or strategy on paper. Only by seeing a pattern over and over again will you truly feel comfortable with it. You must believe in its ability to repeat itself.

If a pattern does not make sense to you, don't trade it. If you don't have a 100 percent belief in it, you will not be able to overcome losing streaks.

All you need is one pattern to make a living! Learn first to specialize in doing one thing well.

Your biggest enemy in trading is going to be a directional bias, an opinion about market direction ... whether yours, a broker's or a friend's. Shut it out! Learn to concentrate on the "right-hand side" of the chart-in other words, on the pattern at hand.

All it takes is getting sloppy once, or experiencing the "frozen rabbit syndrome" in a bad trade, to undo the efforts of the previous 20 trades. Placing initial protective stops must become a habit that is never broken.

In trading, you should take advantage of extremes in price action, high volume, and liquidity. When you learn to seek out emotional extremes in the marketplace, you naturally become good at finding good setups to trade.

Stay in one time frame! Yes, it is important to be aware of the big picture, but it should not affect where you get into or out of a trade or how you manage it. Don't turn short-term scalps into "big picture" trades.

When in doubt, get out! If the market goes dull and quiet after you enter a trade and makes no progress in the direction of your entry, do not wait until your stop is hit. Just get out! Seek a more active market or better trading opportunity.

Don't trade in quiet, dull markets. Dow, Livermore, Rhea, Taylor, Gann-all the greats say this over and over. There must be activity and liquidity in order to trade profitably.

If the market offers you a windfall profit on a trade, lock it in! (Windfall means a much bigger profit than anticipated.) Take profits on half or all of the position. Trail an extremely tight stop on any balance!

Important-if the market starts to move parabolically or has a range expansion move, take profits on the entire position. This is very likely climax!

A range-expansion move is a very large trading bar caused by the last of the market's participants (the emotional latecomers) dog piling into the market. When this last group of traders has entered, there is nobody. left to come in to continue to drive prices up or down.

'When the ducks quack, feed them." In other words, when everybody wants something, that's probably the perfect spot to sell it to them. The price has already been bid way up. Emotions drive the markets to extremes, and these extremes are the ideal spot to exit our trades.

If there's a trend following strategy with a very low win rate (say 27-35%), meaning a lot of false breakouts, playing those false breakouts would yield a much higher win rate, while protecting yourself with tight stops during actual breakouts. Mean reversion idea in there.