acct: $2,002 +113.50 3 trades today, 3 winners in gold. I find decent entry points but I cut them way too short. I'm attaching a chart of my trades today. Any criticism or comments appreciated. Red arrow = entry Black = closing
Monday 13 trades in gcm8 -321.50 Balance: $1,681 Account is drifting lower again. Today I got a bit fustrated and churned the account a little bit, but kept it partially under control.
Tuesday: Haven't been getting much sleep these past few days, so I happen to wake up at around 11PM today and saw I missed most of the move in gold, which was trending UP. I figured it had topped out, and did two very stupid shorts that brought me in the red for 231.50. Fustrated I saw gold started trending up again, and chased it up and bought at the high of the day, and it pulled back for about 5 minutes. I think I was just stubborn and held on. It came back up, and I didn't care if I broke my rules and got out before a change in trend for breakeven. Ending the day +3.50. I gotta get the stupid programming out of my head that says sell tops and buy bottoms, I can't stop thinking these trades are correct. Account at 1,684. Phew a positive day. I'm posting a chart of today's trades. Green Arrow = Long Red = Short Black = Closing
Thursday: Revamped my system this week and the system is doing well, it's just taking me a while to gain confidence in the signals. Today, did 5 trades with 5 winners in gold. I cut each profit short, unfortunately, but the entries are pretty good. Up 612.50 today, best day in a long time. I'm going to end the week today so I can post a positive week, which will help me out psychologically I think. Paper-trading the rest of today and tomorrow. Account is at $2,297. Also looking at the NQ now, as I was reading the thread "Trading e-minis with $1k starting capital" someone said the NQ has more liquidity and less chop, so I'll see if it's better than the YM or not.
Starting: $10,000 Week1: 9,074 Week2: 10,016 Week3: 9,215 Week4: 8,965 Week5: 6,829 Week6: 2,399 Week7: 2,049 Week8: 1,889 Week9 (current): 2,297 Friday: Didn't trade today, like I planned. Gold was choppy and didn't look tradable anyways. Paper traded the YM, held onto a short, which worked. Have been analyzing charts, my past trades, and reading books with almost obsession now. Started up a paper-trading account with ThinkorSwim, and will try my hand at swing-trading with 100K of fake money in futures and forex. ToS has a free stream of CNBC which is awesome. Posted up my trading rules on the wall in front of me, so I can do a quick check list so I don't get into _too many_ impulse trades. The account is at 2.3K, which is about +400 for this week. First positive week in 2 months! I feel like I've hit the floor, in terms of the account. I wish I hadn't killed my account during week 5 and 6. Been getting much better at delaying taking profits, but still something that needs alot of work. Have a good weekend
Hang in there. Don't try to press by doubling up on anything. Just trade the same number of contracts until you are profitable. This will stop the large weekly losses.
HolyGrail: Thanks. I've been doing 1 lots only for a while now. The large losses I took were during 2 weeks... before I knew the value of taking a break! mgabriel01: I used to do up to 30+ trades a day. Now that my account is so low, I had to stop overtrading. Generally trying to keep the number of trades below 5 now, and sim-trading all the impulse trades I used to take. And as for a daily loss limit, I'm trying to stop after 400 or 500. And if I lose 1,000 during the week I'll take a longer break.
Monday: Didn't trade today, gold wasn't moving very well, and there looks like alot of reports coming out later this week, so I'm not sure if tomorrow will be any better.