In the last few days I managed to bring my account from $700 to $1300 today with no down days. However, I could potentially make a lot more money than that but I'm stuck at making only a few dollars. The biggest one day profit this week was $180. But I want to be able to make a lot more than that. One reason for this is because I'm not trading for the entire day. What can I do to get over this and get to the point where making $500 or $1000 or even $2000 seems like a normal day? Or should I just be glad I'm not losing?
Do you think your recent profits were just luck? Or do you have a fully-tested method that you can have confidence in? If your method isn't fully proven/tested, then you are going to be hestitant. If your method is proven profitable, then there's no reason not increase your trade size. Also, there's nothing wrong with trading only the morning session. In the markets I trade (ES in particular), most of the best trading range usually occurs in the the first couple of hours. If I make good profits in the morning, I often just call it a day.
Increase your size 10x fold if you are soo confident in your eddge. Then youll make 1800 not 180$. Problem solved. Come back in a week or two and let us know how it went.
Ha ha. You're crazy. Even if I wanted to, no brokerage is gonna allow that kind of leverage. Unless you want to give me your money... To tomdavis: No it's not luck. Success doesn't just come from a good method, there's also some skill involved. The hardest thing with the morning is shaking off the mental fog from waking up. Most of my mistakes comes from that alone. I'm already waking up around 5-6am but it's still not enough. My mind just doesn't become fully alert until noon.
Don't get greedy. Use strict money management. You're already on a tight account, don't overextend yourself. Stay consistent and keep plugging away. If you try for the "big" days you're going to end up blowing out your account. If you're trading 1 ES at $1300 and feel absolutely confident, when you hit, say, $2500, try 1 trade for 2 contracts with a $500 buffer. Win or lose, go back to 1. Think about increasing contracts rather than trying to catch larger moves. 100 contracts at $100/day is 7 figures per year. Play with it as you will, but you can live completely comfortable only take 2 pts a day. Until you realize this you will not succeed to your full potential. Patience and Discipline are your best friends.
Jinxu, You're way overleveraged, particularly given your level of expertise (as in "I'm sure you're a promising trader", not putting you down or anything, I'm just saying you're not a veteran trader that has opened an account with a 1,000 bucks to conduct an experiment on taking a small account to 100,000 USD). At first I thought you were trading with so little capital because you were living in China or somewhere else where 1,000 USD may be a lot of money, but if I read your posts right you're American and living in the US, correct? If that's the case... get a job - although I know in this economy it maybe easier said than done. I'm not gonna tell you to work and save till you have 50,000 because that would be like telling a 17 year-old kid: "No sex until marriage", but... If you save just a few thousand bucks, say 3,500 on top of your 1,300 plus change, you'll have 5 times more capital than when you started, but your chances of "making it" trading won't be multiplied by 5 but by a hundred. Then with 5,000 give or take you can "reasonably" trade with 2 cars and as you get used to the bigger swings in p&l and provided you keep making steady profits keep adding cars as you go. If with 5,000 you can make - on average yet consistently - 500 a day you'll be in the top 1% of traders and become a millionaire in a couple of years. If with +/-1,000 you keep pushing your luck, you're guaranteed to blow up your account in the first occasion where you cancel your stop (because you can't stomach a perfectly normal loss of 200 USD or so) and it doesn't go back. And the problem won't be the economic loss (no biggie if you're in the US - I guess), but the devastating emotional damage and the scar that it will leave in your psyche that will make any comeback later on exponentially harder. All the best.
Just spend a big amount of your money so that you have a little money in your pocket, and then you will have more effort to make money
You work your way to that level over time. You need to prove you have an edge and inviolable risk management over a long period of time. Then you are ready to increase size and your account growth will allow you to do that. Do you have a pure statistical edge or did you "cheat" to make your profits (by that I mean did you use no stops or ridiculous stops, or average down)? If you did well this week through solid trading and risk management, then your account will continue to grow and reach the point you can size up!