Thanks for the rec, I been meaning to read his "Daily Trading Coach" for awhile now. Didn't know he had a blog too, will check it out.
Sage advice across the board. Long story short, part of this switch to trading was so I could move back home after 20+ years living wherever academia took me. So I guess I just slipped into the natural "catching up" mode and didn't give enough thought to how that could pressure me. My wife is totally looped in of course. She helped me design my trading plan from day 1 and has been a really patient sounding board on the day to day nuances. We've got this system that's been working pretty well where she reviews my trades and then we do a recap together. I'm gonna trade tomorrow and then call it a month, take the rest of the week off. I'll use some of that time to review the profit taking part of my system which still needs a lot of work. Back in August, I sized up before I was ready and got my ass handed to me, so I might hit you up for advice on sizing soon when I think I'm ready to size back up again. Funny how this is a two-tiered improvement process. Master x. Then continue to have it mastered at bigger size. Doubles the difficulty.
More traders need this kind of feedback. When you have to rationalize why you deviated from your plan to someone else it's much harder to deviate from the plan.
That’s very natural, and you may have friends whom you trust enough to be candid with. But be very selective. Best people are those who have followed a similar entrepreneurial route, they can at least empathize. THAT is really awesome and to be frank that is the first time I heard of a spouse participating in such a supportive way. That definitely stacks the odds in your favor, very happy for you. Exits are always harder, imho, than entries. One of the reasons being that certain market environments pay you better to be faster on the trigger while others encourage a hold. I’m still a scalper, never learned to be the ‘ride it home’ type. Those who do the latter usually operate from multiple positions, I’m an all-in, all-out guy. Size is all a matter of just getting used to each tier you size up to. Using shares is the easiest way to do it in the beginning, you can go by the most granular increments you want. Once you get to full contracts like ES it is a challenge when you’re at the first contract, because increasing size immediately doubles your leverage which is too much for most to handle. Best off in those cases either going back to shares like SPY or to micro contracts if you have a hard time getting fills with the ETF you’re using. I try to increase every week or every two weeks, depending. Even if I have a bad week I increase size, not because I want to ‘make it back’, but because if I know I’m simply experiencing normal variance nothing unusual is going on. But many only will increase when they have a positive week or period. That’s up to each individual. Bottom line: experiment and do what makes sense to you.
Thanks, I'm very lucky with her a dozen ways. And I think I'm the type who really needs a collaborator, at least with something this complex, so it's been invaluable. Glad to hear I'm not alone in finding targeting the hardest part. I've always been a big chess nut, and targeting reminds me of something a terrible chess player told me once. He said, "The worst part of my game is endgame because I rarely get to play it!"
If he ever was - why wouldn't he be in today's world? What changed? Regardless, the point was merely how he had noticed consistently worse performance on some days and as such decided to trade lightly or not at all during those periods. And that's obviously still true in general. Not all time periods or days have equal opportunity.