Thank you for sharing NoDoji. When I went over my trades I can see how giving more room should eliminate some losses because more often than not Iâm right on the direction but my timing is a bit off. Plus I want to be able to trade bigger size and tight stops are harder when doing that. I think I'm making right adjustment considering the type of stocks I trade. The only way to find out is to keep trading and look at results.
Day 11 Still getting used to trading without stops with small size. I've been very good at following my rules lately, even though I changed some of them last week. My goal during the trading day is to stick to the plan that I have in writing before market opens. I started this journal to help myself breaking the habit of overriding my rules because of emotional factors: fear and greed. I still have these emotions but now the part of me that knows that this is the numbers game dominates during trading hours (well, most of the time at least). So far so good. Getting emotions under control consistently is probably the most important thing I can do at this point. +191
What you wrote is correct. Keeping your emotions in check and not over trading. I did 1 live trade today, and then went back to sim to test some new rules on how I want to catch moves. One of my problems is once I get a good winning trade like today, I have a problem with NOT wanting to trade with real money the rest of the day, of course if I took a losing trade, I am sure I would look for some more real money trades. Yesterday, I did take 2 trades since I did not feel like I had made enough money with my 1st trade. I am also doing a demo of briefing.com since I wanted to see if I could also trade some stocks, but I will probably cancel it since its too hard to concentrate on stocks and futures at the same time. How many trades do you take per day? Are they all based on your rules, or do you let your profit and loss influence you?
Put your rule out in public and call your trades as you make them. You'll be surprised how a little peer pressure will make you follow the rules.
I trade about dozen of stocks on a good day but lately it's been 2-3. And if there is nothing to trade I might spend whole day and make 0 trades. Overtrading was never a problem for me. Of course I have all those emotions, the only difference lately is that instead of overriding my rules based on my last trade or some big profit or whatever, I'm capable to "override my emotions" and say to myself "don't get emotional, follow the plan, this trade will be just a statistic in my records and most likely I won't even remember it, it's all about numbers game with positive expectancy, etc, etc."
I wouldn't be too concerned about the public following your rules. The good traders have thier own rules and the rest won't follow them anyhow.
Day 12 Some worked, some didn't today. It's not that easy to get adjusted to trading without stops as my mind is so used to trade with tight stops. What helps, I'm writing as I go in my journal, it's a nice outlet for my emotions and keeps me focused on execution. -105 +5962 month
Day 13 For a slow Thursday before long weekend this was an ok day. I can't believe I'm on Day 13, somehow it's so much easier to follow my rules lately. I think it has a lot to do with me actually addressing this issue and working hard on my strats so I have confidence in my rules. Before I knew I didn't follow my rules but I was just telling myself after the close "next time I have to follow my rules" and kept repeating same pattern over and over again. I was doing the same thing for days, have no idea why I expected different outcome. But for last couple of months I was addressing this issue and guess what, results are different now. It's also nice to know that majority of traders going through the same thing and it motivates me even more to not be like majority. Have a great long weekend everyone, +175