All traders know that emotions and discipline are very important influencing factors. Just think about your own trading for a moment and ask yourself how your equity graph would look like if you were able to control your emotions and your discipline better. But as you probably know, it’s not as easy as deciding not stop repeating the same mistakes. Once we sit in front of our charts, have to make trading decisions and need to manage our live trades, our rational thinking usually takes a backseat and we give in to impulsive and emotional thinking. We all have been there.
In Edgewonk, we developed the Tiltmeter as an effective way to help you improve discipline and emotional decision making. The Tiltmeter analyzes and visualizes how well you execute your trades and it shows your level of discipline.
4 reasons why the Tiltmeter will help you become a better trader
1. Accountability
Trading can be a lonely profession and when you don’t have to justify your trading decisions, you are more likely to abandon your rules and try to “outsmart” the market by doing things you knew you shouldn’t be doing. Because traders are usually not held accountable, the learning process takes place much slower and you will often see traders repeating the same mistakes even after years of trading.
This leads to a downward spiral of bad trading behavior. The purpose of a trading journal is not only to serve as a data storage tool, but to hold you accountable and force you to deal with your trading more objectively.
2. Self-Awareness
Before you can start using the Tiltmeter you need to write down your most common mistakes and problems so that you can then use them in your Tiltmeter. This step alone forces you to spend time thinking about your actual trading approach. Many traders never really work on their trading away from the charts. It’s is nearly impossible to become a better trader if you lack self-awareness.
3. It’s like a mentor
Our users constantly send us feedback and many say that knowing that they have to come back to their Edgewonk trading journal later to enter their trades, helps avoid making mistakes during their actual trading. Knowing that you have to go over your trades again and write down that you made the same mistake AGAIN is painful. Edgewonk relentlessly confronts you with your flaws and problems; just this alone often makes the difference for many traders.
One of our customers put it into the correct words when he wrote us an email:
4. It challenges you
For most traders, making a bad decision does not have any meaningful impact, especially if you are not trading full-time. Trading then often just becomes this hobby you do on the side, but which does not lead you anywhere and progress is often non-existent. The Tiltmeter adds a new dimension to your trading and knowing that repeating the same mistake will cause your Tiltmeter to turn red and nullify all your past effort acts as an additional motivator.
5. Find out how much you are really losing
Most traders are not even aware where they are leaking money. You can compare that to a business owner who has no diea what he spending money on and how much. By analyzing how often you have made a certain mistake Edgewonk also shows you how much money you are really losing. The screenshot below shows a common scenario where a trader would have been profitable by being more disciplined. For many traders, this will be an eye opener and once you realize how close you really are to profitable trading, you will look at your trading decisions in a very different light.
The Tiltmeter is specifically built to tackle the most common problem areas that cause traders to underperform. For many traders, the Tiltmeter can be the first and biggest step towards better and more profitable trading which is also the main reason why the Tiltmeter-challenge is at the beginning of our 12-week trader development program.