Sure you can. Why couldn't you ? If you're ready to overcome all the walls. It's not easy at all, especially alone or in bad company. One need the right ideas as well as a genuine implementation. But if you can't tell what you do... You won't be able to trash or improve. Test your assumptions, then build piece by piece from that healthy foundation. Try to systematize things as much as possible. Get them as clear as crystal. Cause you can't really improve from a messy, fuzzy, broken system. By the way .. I have no Max(Daily Loss). To trade or not ... It depends on your system and on your psychology. I don't set arbitrary constraints. Nowhere ! What's the plan ? The right conditions ? If everything is OK. Pull the trigger ! & Run simulations / experiment. Test even your hardest beliefs. And train yourself to take losses ! If you don't take them you won't take them. Your body & your mind have to get immunized against losses. If you don't expose yourself to lots of loss taken. You'll stay 4ever vulnerable. I designed painful experiments just to get stronger on my weaknesses. Spot your weaknesses ! Your P&L is as weak as your weakest spot. The experiment I designed was simple : Cut loss 1 point away, take profit 2 points away. At the end you take twice as much losses, It costs you a bit, but it saves you a lot. That's kind of an investment ...
it depends on how fast learner are you can you learn faster than the effects of your shortcomings will be playing out - that is the question switch to paper, and never, never play against your method (yourself) not with a paper not with the real money but that is just a first step next step: to develop a working method - that is the real challenge
Looking at your stats I don't see anything bad. In fact you are still up 520 bucks after a month with that outsized loss! If i were you I wouldn't cry too much about it. That's just trading, we all make big mistakes that take out weeks of work every once in a while. LEARN THE LESSON and move on. It still looks to me like a winning system, whatever it is that you are doing. And for gods sake you've been trading the system for 1 month! Keep doing your trade when you hit the $500 dollar loss mark (roughly) just get flat right away and rethink the trade. Remember that getting flat temporarily isn't neccesarily throwing in the towel on the trade. Once you are out and flat, you can see things much more clearly. So get flat at the $500 dollar loss mark and wait like at least 10-30 mins, if the trade still looks good maybe reenter at a better price but chances are you'll decide to fuck off for the rest of the day and decide to spend it hating yourself, but you did the right thing cutting the loss, (ok not always). It just hurts a lot but guess what, that pain will be gone in a day or two and you'll be ready to trade again. I know from experience, those days suck but the pain goes away just make sure you drill it in your head what you did wrong so hopefully it won't happen more than a few times because you always make the same mistakes more than once before it gets drilled into your head. Don't listen to anyone who says that your losses cannot be bigger than your gains, fuck yes they can as long as you have tons of winners and few big losers. Like your system does. That's still a winning system. IF anything i'd say size up but size up on every trade, not when you have a big loss cause sizing up aint gonna save your trade trust me.
Haha. Why not set the profit target 10 points away? That way, your wins are 10 times larger than your losses, right? In fact, set your stop loss to break-even. Then you will never have any losses at all! So simple!
It has happened to me too; I knew I had to get out but stayed there for some illogical reasons until I realised I was on the wrong side. Human traders are exposed to some cognitive bias and it's always there especially when we trade with intuitive rules. Before I focused on trees. Now I focus more on the forest but it brings problems too. So I am moving onto the next level. I am now trying to find statistically significant patterns , trading boundaries etc. - the quantitative approach which relies on high probabilities.
Traders pay lots of money for big workstations and trading platforms in order to do this sort of trading.... chances of you successfully competing (and outbidding them) on a mobile phone is not very high. You may need to focus more with a better toolset if you are into this more active form of trading. Friday's are tricky. Lots of things happen on a Friday. Be careful on Fridays (options, cashing out for weekly profits, or to go cash for protection from the weekend). You'll be playing against institutions who will do massive transactions in the last minute of a Friday (anyone notice that spike in volume on SPY at the close?) 7 days in a row.... to quote Han Solo: Nice shooting kid, don't get cocky! You can win 7 in a row and loose more on the 8th. You can loose 7 days in a row and make more in the 8th. My honest suggestion to you is to consider non-active forms of trading for a while just to get used to using the tools, watching the markets, exercising known strategies that 'work' and you are comfortable with. A real simple thing to do is day-trade normal equities. That way you don't worry about margins or after hour tradings, and if you deal in an equity that is not complete risk, you can just hold it if it goes south until it goes back again. For example, pick up 100 shares of CSCO and play that on the course of a day with the same strategy you would do for futures (if that is what you are in to). Or even SPY as a 'safe' alternative to futures. Heh.. SPY as an alternative to ES.
Sure you can make a profit trading..... Question is how much is your principal and how much you want to make. Are you happy with 2%? Throw it all in SPY and go enjoy the rest of life... real easy. Are you playing with 20k and want to somehow make 30k/year to pay for all your expenses... that is more difficult. If you are playing with 1M and want to make 30k/year... that's do-able. The 'Market' is not a 'game' (although some treat it like that). At its fundamental level it is a means of you LENDING money to someone else so they can make money with that loan and then return YOU a portion of the profits. It's a business transaction where you are expecting to be reimbursed for your loan. But this only makes you so much money (risk free rate + risk premium). If you want to make a lot more money you need to take on a lot more risk. And eventually the amount of risk you take starts to resemble gambling.
If the trade makes sense But it's moving against you Add to it But if you're punting deltas It doesn't really matter what you do All roads lead to ruin Your choice is how long it takes.