EMG’s infamous diagram illustrates my on and off trading career over the last few years (no 3d party stuff though). Starting a new circle today, with a 5K account. Instruments: CL, TF/NQ and an occasional GC. Objective: trade 4-5 days a week and have at least 1K left at the end of 2014. Trading plan: don’t use any money management rules and take only impulsive discretionary trades. Journal purpose: publicly document the insanity of the 90% and potentially get inspiration for behavior modification. Decision to quit trading is also an acceptable outcome at the end of this exercise.
Day 1: -514.50 Too many cuts picking TF bottom. While the last trade was 1k profit, it wasn't enough to undo the damage.
-1,994 Just a little taste of what Ghetto supastar trading looks like - account cut in half in 1 hour. Adding a rule: 1 contract at a time until the blowup.
+408 I guess this is the delaying part. 1 contract only, even though the demon that tells me to add more contracts after few losses was still present.
I think i'm guilty of doing this sort of behaviour a looong time ago. You have spent years doing it. It's time to end it now (not your life!), you've done it and have the t-shirt. Time to move on and trade properly.
Not sure why you are doing this. If you trade too big volatility takes you out of the game and its often death by a thousand cuts in trading fees. Whats new in that? Why not save yourself some time and money by doing some useful analysis instead e.g. historical probability of knockout at different leverage amounts. At least you may learn something. As it is you will just blow up another account in the same way many people before you have done. How does that help?
+123 The market has a unique ability to fuk up otherwise healthy brain, no wonder shrinks are talking about self improvement through trading. Until I develop the ability to control myself, there is no point in defining any plans. So this is an attempt to find control to trade the size I say I will trade. I can easily commit to posting all my trades here and I think it will help now that I know people can see them. Hopefully the thought of putting on more than 1 contract, then having to write about it "ummm, I don't know what happened, wtf was I thinking" will prevent me from doing it. So thanks for reading/commenting! The trade sequence is correct, but trades 13-18 were executed on a different PC, and NT report apparently doesn't recognize time stamp/commissions in that case. Will do excel export/merge for multi-PC trading in the future. Was expecting that CL move down, but got distracted with TF at the open and it went down without me.
+127 *can't stop yet - too addicted *5K is now 3.1K Kiva seems cool and has a decent feel-good element, but: 1.2% default rate? That's way too much risk. Made a few bucks for my friendly neighborhood broker, but kept the size under control and get to gamble another day. Time to smoke some kush, put the Lyft mustache on my Honda Civic and go try to make next months rent. Good weekend to all.
-817 Was 100% sure today was supposed to be the day when BTFD department steps in and moves it up without a pullback and I had no intentions of missing that move. Number of those scratch trades were showing 100+ profit at some point, but who needs that - the account is down only 55% or so.