Thanks all for your advice and help. Namely, in the thread about losing days and calling it quits. That thread alone helped me immensely. Feels good. Now, I just have to erase the $3,000 in net loss I racked up from June->September.
Nice going. That's a great feeling. I almost had a record month until the little change of direction in the last 15 minutes today
Well, I guess I would've had more of a record month had I not tried some experimenting. I took some mild losses this month because I was trying to add another stock to the mix. I trade the same stock over and over every day. I can't seem to trade other things as effectively. Maybe I just need to take some losses on another stock to figure it out? The stocks that "grind" up and down give me a lot of trouble. Stocks that have relatively thin books that "pop" a lot during the day are the ones I trade best. ... Or do I sound crazy? The stock I trade every day has different personalities somedays, where it's grinding more than on other days. The book gets thicker and movement is much slower, it screws with my profit taking. Today, for example, what normally would've caused a reversal was blown out in a matter of seconds and my usual escapes were obliterated. Do I sound nuts? The "chaos" days where the usual patterns don't work give me a lot of trouble still. As in, the low-risk setups I rely on fail a lot more on days with hyper-active trading. If I can get over this "behavior change" in stocks, I would be even more profitable than now. Maybe all of this is in my head and I need to just keep cranking out trades, but still do cheap experiments from time to time.
Great Job --- baby steps! because the laws of compounding can take over for you once you get on a roll!