You are trying to swing for the fences and hit a home run each and every day. A recipe for disaster. Focus on risk management and risk no more than 2% of your account and use stop losses. One thing guaranteed is you will have losing trades. For a $24,000 account, that should be $480.00 per trade. If you buy a $10 stock, you can only buy 48 shares. Limit yourself to 5 trading positions. Total risk would be 10% of your account, $2,400. That is already on a worst case scenario. That seems too low an amount for a lot of people but, the goal is not to blow out your account. You can grow a small amount into a large account provided, you stick to the position size and also, align your trade with the trend. Trading against the trend is the hardest thing to do. Most times you will lose. The profits will come when you have taken care of the little things. That is the least of your worries. Try position trading where the stress is less since, your time horizon is measured in months and years, depending on how strong the trend is.
A tip of the hat to Robert Morse for his post from which this was lifted, 'What is your process? What triggers a buy or a sell to open? What triggers an exit? How do you size your trades? When you made money, why would you say that worked when you did the same thing on another trade and it failed?' https://elitetrader.com/et/threads/mentors-and-education.341110/#post-5026834
iamthagod, seems to me that 24k is an otherworldly sum to only make $1600, since September. Try a new playbook, yours sounds very technical and I am not sure if you are venturing out to the deepwater for a thrill, maybe traditional doesn't excite you. Do you have a portfolio? I disagree with the belief that newbies and no analysis are the ones lucking into money. Simple works. Enter and exit and repeat. Pay yourself, pay the government.
1. Stop trading. Now. Please. 2. Get a job. Any job - you need cash flow. 3. The way that you're going about this is completely unrealistic and set up to fail. Speaking for myself - I worked full time as an Engineer and traded the evening Pit session and Project A for a few years until I was consistently taking enough money out if the markets to consider transitioning to full time trader. And my wife kept her job at IBM. 4. Right now you need space and time and cash flow. You also need to take the pressure off of yourself and your marriage. 5. You do not have a viable trading system.
Sounds like you need a break from trading. You have the wrong mindset going into a position from your losses. You need to take a break and clear your mind then come back when you're ready, or maybe trade a smaller amount.
hahahaha FEELS Like this guy stepped into the a den of Lions, the advise is good though that he is getting as one person here said, if ur young and see ur self doing this stick to it but if u cant imagine doing it for life quit now and just buy and hold, and maybe a tiny bit of salt and pepper on top and learn options to slightly improve on buy and hold itself, but dont do anything differently till you learn
Trading is a scam for >99% of people. The <1% (some here on this forum) have figured out how to take advantage of the mass. That's the cold truth. Sorry.