Man you're in the emotion-hole. I doesn't matter how good your systems are. You must get back to standard, follow iron discipline and focus on getting rid of your emotions. If emotions are still there, trade less or don't trade at all. Take some time off. Go on a holiday for 3-6 days. Works wonders. If you don't want to leave the market, however, you can just look at it for a few days (again, 3-6) -without trading at all. Just play the simulator and keep a stringent log, recording all your emotions. You can do both for free with the futures-trader frontend for IB. It's a lot like NinjaTrader etc. It's free in sim mode and it's awesome, plus you can record trade logs! Download: www.futures-trader.net This will make you focus on your strategy rather than emotions. Trade longer time frames and take more time to evaluate your trades and detail everthing about it in a log. Longer timeframes will make you more objective than 1-min charts, because your heartbeat doesn't tend to follow every tick so much, which settles your emotional problem, too. This is why scalping is so "stressy" and pit traders have such high insurance premiums! And most importantly: RELAX! Relax man and follow your plan. I hope this helped you a little. Sincerely, ~The Scientist
of course I am so inconsistant ... I better stick to arb and play only spots that offer what I think is a good risk / reward
Was there any point in the day that you realized that you were breaking your own rules? If you did notice, then you should have exited all positions immediately and taken a break from trading. If you didn't notice, you need to develop better abilities at monitoring yourself. You need to develop a meta-you that you can count on to lay down the law.
I'm guilty of breaking my trading rules today as well. I shorted SNDK at 48.96 at 1:06 PM as it had again broken down through the previous close. My mental stop was at 49.10 and my target was 48.60-48.50. It wiggled and wiggled, and came close to hitting my stop but didn't. Then, for some reason, I got nervous and exited at 1:26 at the same price I'd shorted it at. What happened next? You guessed it - it fell 45 cents over the next 10 minutes and I could've/should've/would've made my target profit. Sometimes it's difficult to stick to one's rules.
He enters. The entry is primitive but it doen't matter. He has an offset stop. (The offset is not too swift but doen't matter.) He does C&R according to one rule. Rule is okay and has a definite lag though. The periodicity of his C&R is set by market. This is his super key so far. Okay he blows up once in a while. WHY? Simple. He has goals to meet. I bet all blow ups are in the summertime. This guy is not too swift. thats okay you don't have to be to make money. He has opne really bad hang up. trying to meet goals. goals are bad enough setting the wrong goals is a bad thing. I only made 19 points on the ES mini who cares!!!!!!! This guy simpply throws thebaby off the empirestate building when he is behind in goals. As a beginner he needs to drop goals and ONLY trade easy money low risk set ups>
And obviously you feel like the entire market was watching your trading finger for it to press the button to exit so it could go on down...? If I had a $ for every time that has happened to me I would be a very rich woman indeed, but I grew out of it, as will you, and the only way to grow out of it is to have the courage to leave it alone. Cathy made a good point in another thread about the market's wiggle, and ES especially does wiggle a lot, trying to shake out all the weaker players ahead of a good move. Have you ever noticed how when things start to really motor, there is usually a fairly sharp pull back and then it motors some more even faster? It's the same in the slower times, but because it happens much more slowly and over a longer timeframe, the quick retracements catch more players out. It's easy to get phased by a very quick and sudden move in the opposite direction that only just moves back to equilibrium and very slowly and then kinda pauses there. That's the very time, when there needs to be most confidence in your system and the analysis of overall direction, because even though there has been a quick shakeout, the direction hasn't changed much. In around 70% of days, half of those are a single direction day with the odd shakeout move for good measure, the larger proportion of the remainder have a pullback that trends for a reasonable distance and time and then reverts to original direction ( making a pseudo single directional day), and the remainder of that chunk are 2 directional i.e. a strongish trend in one direction follow by a reversal to the other. If you are with the flow, it still takes courage to stay in, but re-affirming that may well help, and when a few that you have stayed in turn into winners, then it will slowly get easier to ride the wave... The remainder ofthe days are divided into range days that bounce back and forth a few times, and those that have a sideways direction and basically just drift. I have no idea if any of that will help. Hope so Best Natalie