You need to size smaller and figure out how to tell yourself you deserve to win(Be paid for following the plan!). I was thinking of a trading psychologist, getting a better understanding what is making you feel comfortable with a loss while a $1000 gain not.
A trading psychologist is a waste of time and materiel. They were not traders. They are just Tim Robbins types who spout complicated "feel good measures". They will bleed you dry. Wabu, I told you to get profitable on the small scale, before scaling up to the point where a $1K win can become a $7K loss. Seek out my journal for what I mean. It's a long read. It might give you insights.
I find this part interesting. It sounds like what you are saying is that your confidence level can somehow predict what will happen next. Its as if when the trade doesn't go in your direction, it means that you were somehow wrong about entering. When you say you don't go in if you're unsure, unsure of what? Your ability to read the market? Your ability to predict the future direction? Perhaps what you mean to say is that if you only did more work and study, you would be able to predict what the market will do next with even more accuracy? Your confidence level should only be about knowing what to do and when, and the confidence is in your ability to execute. You are literally trying to predict a future event that hasn't happened yet and you have your self worth somehow tied up in your ability to accurately predict this. This is nuts. You say its tiring to watch the NG trade go sideways. You should have a plan for that. If it went down instead of up, there should be a plan for that too. Even if the plan is to hold and average in as it goes against you, fine, but it shouldn't come as a surprise or cause you pain. Imagine how good it would feel if you just did what you had planned to do. I think your stress is coming from... a) trading too large for your account since you clearly want to hold a trade that is working against you (which is fine if you have a plan for that) b) not knowing fully well what you will do when your main thesis doesn't work out (ie. take a small loss, hold and average in, reverse direction c) assuming that your confidence level can somehow predict what will happen next. Sure, there is an element of probability and we are entering trades assuming that we have a better probability of our trade making money vs. losing money. But by saying that you don't go in if you're unsure, it seems to imply that when you do go in, you are sure, and then when it doesn't do what you thought it would, you can't believe that you could be wrong. Its a bad framework.
If you keep going "all in" when confident, you can consider yourself lucky to have 1 profitable year out of 11 yrs trading.
stocks can be worse than futures. The issue is to do you have a good system to predict the future price of either or is recent performance just being unlucky? the most important part of trading is that you stay in the game under any circumstance. Losing 7k for an account your size is unacceptable.
8/6 -$811 for the week -$9271 Well that was hell of a start to a journal. I dont know whats more surprising. Losing almost 10K in a week or still up 1.5K for the past 4 weeks. Exited all my positions. Balance was $24799 so added 3K so I can daytrade stocks next week. Going to go back to 1 contracts if i trade futures. That will probably mean 2 or 3 but it will not be all in like how i was all this week. I think I can make 10K again in about 3-5 weeks if i just play it safe. dang this was a bad week.
I suggest you trade $500 size each trade, you need to learn how to walk before you can run. I am a scalper and usually only profit 0.5 - 3.5 cents per share when winning and lose 0.5-1.5 per shares when losing, my strategy is very very safe, I was able to continue winning for months without a single red day, When the stock volume (I only trade certain same stocks every day unless there are new ones to fit my requirements )is heavy, my trading size is usually $100K, like in May, I was able to make $100K per week for 3 consecutive weeks, lately, the stock volume decreased dramatically, during the month of July, my size was reduced to $30K per trade, I managed to profit roughly $10K+ each week in average, I understand that is less than 40%, but it is doable if I change the size to $40K and still quite safe.
You obviously don't have the discipline I was hoping to see in your futures trading. What is even more scary is that this was a mild week in PA and you lost that much. And this is a very disturbing line..."Going to go back to 1 contracts if i trade futures. That will probably mean 2 or 3..." You can mess around with stocks all you want, but you gotta' have a serious plan for futures. Going back to 1 should not mean "2 or 3." Sheesh.