How To Use The Edgewonk Tiltmeter
All traders know that emotions and discipline are very important influencing factors in trading. 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 just deciding to stop repeating the same mistakes. Once we sit in front of our charts and 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. But it also acts as an invisible mentor who is always looking over your shoulder and with the Tiltmeter-challenge, traders can significantly improve their discipline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLkHqgqkOhs
4 reasons why the Tiltmeter will help you become a better trader
1. Accountability
When you don’t have to justify your trading decisions to anyone, 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. Knowing that you have to go over your past trades once again will already help your trading significantly.
2. Self-Awareness
Before you can start using the Tiltmeter you need to write down your most common mistakes under the comments and problems so that you can then use them in your Tiltmeter. This step forces you to spend time thinking about your actual trading approach.
This is a great practice because most traders never really work on their trading away from the charts. Setting up your Tiltmeter and thinking about your current struggles will help you become aware of negative patterns and it also forces you to do some active work as a trader.
3. Edgewonk is 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 them avoid making mistakes during their actual trading in the first place.
Knowing that you have to go over your trades again and write down that you made the same mistake AGAIN is painful and many traders will realize at one point how much money they are losing by always doing the same things which never work out.
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. The Tiltmeter constantly challenges you
For most traders, making a bad decision does not have meaningful impacts, especially if you are not trading full-time. Trading then often just becomes this hobby you do on the side 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.
That’s also why we put our Tiltmeter challenge at the very beginning of our trader development course. It is a great starting point and it is usually where traders see the greatest jump in their performance once they can become more disciplined.
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 idea what he is spending his money on and how much of it. By analyzing how often you have made a certain mistake Edgewonk shows you how much money you are really losing. 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 trader development program.