He played wimi and we road it into AH, was a great time! I posted a $120k overnight gain with snippet and got accused of manufacturing my pl so I get why he is not. No more big day trade gains getting posted after that bs!
Week 2 (July 13-17) -4957 -1336 1594 280 369 ----- Total = -4050 These swings (the negative ones at least) are the sign of my deficiencies, in my opinion. Whenever I have such terrible days it is because I did something I knew I should not have. After 1.5 years of trading it has become obvious to me that my PnL is the direct result of my inner conflicts. For example, this week I did not consciously plan to lose almost exactly what I had earned the previous week, nor to stop trading if I did so, but that is just what happened. In June I managed to grow my account by over 66% in 10 winning days in a row (by day trading stocks, not thanks to a lucky swing or option trade) and I lost it all in 3 or 4 days. I really want to stop punishing my self. All I am interested in is to progressively become capable of favourably adapting to any changes in the market, and at a basic level of performance such as mine, I believe that skill is 100% psychological. Until next week!
On Monday my potential profit was about 1.5k in the middle of the afternoon, until stocks started plunging, and I held to the bitter end instead of observing the mental stop that I had determined. I rarely hold stocks throughout the day because I hate the possibility that this might happen, as I get easily frustrated and get out too late. But I also experience frustration at the thought of missing all the rallies, so I went for it, but was incapable of exiting the trade. When I capitulated, I was furious, thinking that I may have sold at the bottom, and could not resist entering a new long position, with full leverage this time. Of course, the stock price kept falling and I sold late (at the real bottom), doubling my previous loss. On Tuesday I saw a nice move coming at the open on another stock but I did not dare trade it and probably felt frustrated as I saw my prediction materialize. I think this led to poor quality "revenge" trades during the rest of the day. I also anticipated a likely strong rise in yet another stock halfway through the morning, very similar to the move I had traded the day before, but having been bitten and twice shy, I did not dare trade it. I thus missed a near 20% move on that stock. The next two days were decent. On Friday I anticipated a considerable pullback in a stock that had surged over 80% in 12 days, and it happened, but I hesitated too long before shorting it. I started irrationally buying the stock, perhaps because my previous experiences in similar situations had led me to believe that I always initiate reversal/fade trades too early. I fooled myself into thinking that the drop was just a "fakedown" and held my long position even though the price kept falling at a tremendous rate. When I capitulated, I was down 1.2k. The only reason I ended up with a profit was that I eventually shorted that stock and held the position for a while. I managed to cover right at the low of the day. I am gripped by fear most of the time and that is what prevents me from trading what my intuition tells me is the most likely outcome of a setup. The irony is that I also enter many trades on an impulse and with no good reason. Sometimes, as was the case on Monday, I gather the courage to trade what I think is right, but I struggle to accept that at some point the trade may become stale. Thank you for your question 10 bagger. Until I started this thread I had only held a private journal and it never really helped me. I hope this more public form of journaling will be useful.
First off, I'm sorry to hear about your losses and thank you for sharing your thought process. I think every trader have made the mistake of "revenge trading" during their trading career. I know i have done this quite a few times over the course of the past decade of trading. Every trader have a different financial situation, trading strategies, and different appetite for risks so take pick and choose what i say if anything i say is a bit helpful. 1. You mentioned that you have been trading full time for 1.5 years so were you profitable from day 1? If so, you are a rare breed. It took me 7-8 years of trading part time until i finally become consistently profitable in 2012. Without the occurrence of a blackswan, if your daily swings have an emotional affect on your ability to execute your trading plan there is a good chance you are overtrading and should think about lowering your trading size. IMO early on your trading career you should concentrate more on following your trading plan, learning as much as you can with the market you are trading and not worry so much about the results assuming you are not taking huge losses. The amount of money that you can make now is going to be relatively small compared to what you can make 5-10 years down the line if you continue to grow and get better as a trader. 2. Dealing with mistakes. All traders make mistakes so the most important thing is that you learn something valuable so that you do not make these same mistakes again in the future. Early on, i welcome trading mistakes if i feel that i can learn something valuable from it. I knew that those mistakes will save me money down the line because I will not make those same mistakes when my trading size is 5-10x bigger down the line. I will happily pay a few hundred now if i can learn from it and save thousands down the line. 3. Emotional discipline. I think only you can tell when you are not 100%. If you are feel that you are not 100%, you should consider taking a break from trading(a few days or however long it takes) if you feel that you need to mentality reset to absorb big trading losses. 4. Following your trading plan/rules. I think it's extremely important to follow your trading plan/rules. I rarely ever get frustrated or upset with the outcome of a trade if i followed my trading plan. For the first couple of years of trading i tried my very best to follow every trading rule that i had, but it's always hard and i always find myself deviating from my trading rules weekly or monthly. As a day trader the market changes too fast so we don't a lot time to react to what we are seeing so often times we react on impulses. Sometimes its right and sometimes it's wrong but i kept data on every deviation that i made the first 3-4 years of trading to see what the net results would be if i followed my rules compared to deviating. What i found was that those deviations cost me thousands of dollars early on. However, by year 4-5 years, my deviation actually outperformed my systematic management rules so i started to give myself more flexibility in how i manage my trades. 5. Writing trading rules and things learned down. I find this to be extremely helpful. In my trading room, i have a bunch of things written down and next to my computer so i can see them whenever i'm trading. I hope that i have said something that's useful to you. Thank you for sharing and good luck trading next week. 10_bagger
Hey, thanks a lot for your answer 10_bagger. To answer your question, I have not been profitable from day 1 and am barely profitable now. For the past few months, since I started trading full time, the account value has been stagnant, although I regularly withdraw the funds for my living expenses from the account, so the situation is not so bad. I have definitely been overtrading. I spend way too much time looking at very short term charts. As for trading rules, I keep deviating from them, but several might be inappropriate in the first place. I also do many types of trades, and sometimes I become confused as to what time frame and target price I had in mind when I entered a trade, which only adds to the difficulty of turning a profit. I can relate to what you say about the differences you observed between a hypothetical strict observance of your rules and the results you obtained for many years. But I cannot help being very flexible as to what setups I can trade. In my opinion, market conditions change too much for me to be keep more than a small set of very simple rules to guide me. In any case, your message made me question the way I trade, and I am grateful for your participation. Although I named the thread "day trading journal", I made several trades that were intended to be swing trades this week. I am currently into one. My ambition is not to day trade my whole career. Even when I make profits in day trading, they are generally small and too laborious to obtain. I always tell myself that if I had a larger account, I would swing trade much more and day trade much less. Many of the swing trades that I have made so far have grown my account much more than my day trades and I think I will start to make more of the former. Week of July 20-24: 272 -2366 -2248 -2749 564 (realized) + 4067 (unrealized - current swing trade, expecting a greater gain) ----- Total: (rlz) -6527; (unrlz) 4067
Another thing that I see from your results which I have already mentioned is how big your swings are. I know it’s due to the increased in volatility. In my third earning of trading my account size was in the 300k range and only then that I start to have the kind of swings u are having now. It’s just my opinion, but it seem to me, u are really over trading and ur trading size is too big. I don’t think it’s normal to Have swings of 2-4 percent on your overall portfolio this early in your career. I agree that swing trading is less stressful and also not as time consuming. But I still prefer to day trader because I feel that I have more control of my results. Anyways, good luck this week. I hope u do well.
I don't get it. Why post if you don't want to talk about your trades? Nobody cares about your totally unsubstantiated P/L. You haven't posted a single chart or a single trade or strategy. I could claim any P/L for any trade or day or week if I wanted. It's not real if it isn't backed up. How does that ancient internet proverb go? Oh yeah... "Pics, or it didn't happen." Why do you even exist for us? I am sure you are a wonderful person in 3D but you are just breathing the air here and returning nothing. Your journal is not a journal. It is a made-up (as far as we know) tally sheet.