What kind of stops money you risking on each trade? NQ trades very much like ES so when I trade it I use same risk of $150 but have no intension of letting price go all the way to trigger. I can't figure out what type of signal you using to enter, if possible if you could add a chart, be easier try to add value to your trading instead of account performance, least to me. Of course if you don't want any help from the peanut gallery, understood.
It's an open journal and comments, even criticisms, are always welcome. The fact that you took the time to post adds value in and of itself, and I appreciate that more than you know! Your desire to help speaks of your character. I use on average 30 to $60 stops, mostly mental stops. My charts are very bare and nothing special. There's nothing on it that one can glean from and see how I enter trades. It has to do with my discretionary ways of doing things. Once I get a feel for market bias, then I look for entries and targets. Today's price action is not very conducive to my trading and i chalk it up as "take what you can get" and move on. One last thing if I may. This is a hobby for me and don't need to profit to pay bills. My day job, home, and retirement savings are taken care of. This mitigates any stress from losing trades. That said, I do take this business very seriously and I intend to win.
One thing I noticed that I think is accounting for your lack of success (and mine partially) is the ability to let profits ride. Just looking at your trades they are almost always less than 100$ profit. 100$ loss is reasonable in NQ. The NQ's ATR is avg 55 pts the last 5 days and in Jan/Feb it was around 100 pts. If 5 pts = 100$, in this env some days you should have trades that can net up to 1000$ per contract. I don't know about you, but I would rather place 1 trade per day and make 1k than be scalping for 100$ here and there...
masterm1ne... Some traders simply cannot leave a position to run... even AFTER a comfortable no-loss stop is reached. Ideally a partial trade should be allowed to at least reach half of ATR.
Folks who take up day trading as a hobby most eventually just loss all their funds no matter how serious as you take it, t is not you just against yourself, but people who do it full time and live on profits. Hobby people generally do not have that vicious "I want to hurt you with my entire mind-body-and soul" makeup, whereas those who don't do this as a hobby take it far more serious and have the vicious dog feelings. Those who have this, generally live and breath learning how to do that to you and everyone else who has this hobby. Wives and GFs sometimes don't see us for few years when we first starting. So if you don't see noticeable improvement....Trading is not hard at all, but keeping the money is really hard to learn. NQs has a whippy way about itself and why I risk $150 which gets hit like once every 2-3 weeks cause market jumped hard, NQ has much bigger Swings, like ES has a swing of 7-10 points on average, whereas NQ has 18-25 point swings. Now you might ask why to keep track of "mean" swing ave, you want to less likely take trend trades when ave mean ending is more likely to happen, or if in middle of a swing, instead of taking three points, you might be able to take fifteen points. I rather be scalping $100 exits for 60 minutes then quit for the day when I get my Goal 15/20 points each lot and do size than pray I hit homeruns and have to sit here all day. Nap Time
Point taken. But I don't like to sit through large swings. At some point this will all work itself out. Today is only day #6 of my return.