You can always find a reason why a trade was "wrong"

It took a while to sink in but what I have learnt about trading is that backtesting is very naive, and whenever you make a loosing trade, you can ALWAYS find a reason why it went wrong by backtesting.

The biggest dilemma is that of support/resistance vs the trend. If you make a losing trade on S/R, then the guru will always say "you went against the trend",

If you make a losing trade going with the trend, the guru will just say you bought/sold into S/R!

Having said that, trading on S/R is really the only way to trade I feel, you need to go into profit asap and have a very very tight stop, for when you enter a trade with the trend but go into negative territory your faced with the hard decision, do you hold the trade and wait for price to come back and put you into profit? Or do you exit the trade NOW and take the loss, only to watch price come back to your level and go your way later?

Trying to make an active decision here always puts you at a loss. I nearly always made the "wrong" decision, exiting a losing position too early , or hanging onto trades that went hundreds of pips against me since last time it "came back".

You have to trade like a robot, and be very mechanical with your system. Never use intuition, just go with price and what the chart is saying.

This also brings me to the subject of following so called "experts" and analysts through various websites, countless predictions are made which almost always turn out to be wrong. Yet I still find myself looking at their opinions and it always sways my own judgement.

if guru X says the market is going to fall, then that affects my own opinion and affects how I trade. Indeed, following the news and listening to others is probably the worst thing I am doing, its just "noise", only the price and chart is the "signal".

Trading is the hardest thing I have ever done, its no surprise the vast majority lose their money, whenever you enter a trade, you always have at least a 50% chance of being right, but emotion is so powerful it always make you trade too defensively.

One thing that is clearly so deeply rooted into human psychology is the urge to always gamble the loser and accept the small winner.

When faced with the proposition of definitely accepting a small loss, or taking a gamble between losing nothing or accepting an even bigger loss, we ALWAYS gamble.