Could be a variety of things...Here are things that have screwed me up: Risking 60 cents to make 20 cents.....not realizing I need to be right 90% of the time to make money (after commissions) using this scenario. Refusing to simply take the loss, and instead pulling stops or moving stops lower....wind up erasing last 15 good trades because of 1 huge bad trade. Losing on 3 trades in a row and then deciding to revenge trade....not realizing it is simple math...if you flip a coin you can wind up with 3 tails in a row no problem...why can't same odds apply to trading. Impulse trading rather than sitting patiently at waiting for a setup. --------------------- OP I bet if you sat behind the screen and did nothing for the 1st hour of the trading day, and limited yourself to only 2 trades a day (with stops, and profit targets for each trade), you'd probably wind up finishing most weeks profitably. It's the impulse trading and lack of discipline that kills most of us.
A week or two? You're nearing $25K and taking 10% daily var? No, you should not be trading until you have found an edge.
This is how I feel about it, it's just that I want it sooner than later. I don't want to quit and I believe that success in trading is one of the greatest things in the world. I just want to make sure I'm not being unrealistic, I don't have a lot of comparison points so idk how to measure where I'm at. I never want to quit, I just don't want to be the guy who blows his entire life savings because I wasn't being realistic. I'm pretty sure based on my collected data that I CAN be successful here if I can stay mentally focused.
This game is tough. If you don't have a verifiable, replicable edge that can't be expressed in some algorithm, my advise to you is to take a break. If you are a keyboard "cowboy" where your triggers are "gut" and you are producing these bad results... stop. Like Robert said, if your process yields X , trading till June won't change X. There are very few gut traders with a sustainable success. "Trading freedom " unless automated can be illusory .. what used to feel like "freedom" starts to not feel not so once you get older and HAVE to stare at your screen 6.5 hours a day.Now algorithmic trading where you turn on a pc then watch oprah all day is another story. Dude.. at your age.. learn a skill preferably related to STEM , many doors will open... not to mention if you learn something along the lines of AI/ML, you can then fail fast and cheap thru backtests,etc.
I don't understand this reasoning at all. If anything, breakout plays are pretty tight and 'less' risky - if the stock breaks, you ride it with a close stop, if it fails, you bail. So you had a bunch that failed today... and the broad market is down... it's bound to happen. 3 out of your 4 trades should have been scratches.
All my triggers come from some "pattern" that ive seen 1000 times now. I generally focus on parabolic breakout moves in the first 30 minutes of the day then I transition into trading wedge breakouts with a stop above/below the most recent move. So I'm not just assuming things will go my way and getting into random pos if thats what you mean by "gut" trading.
In my experiance, it is very hard to make money in the first 2 min. Many traders play breakouts, it jumps, then dips to the old break out point, maybe a little below, and all the day traders stop out, then 30 min later, we are higher.
I do agree with you. my mentor tells me "never lose a trade to fear, only to your price" So setting a stop and going for a scratch trade mentally makes me feel like im losing to fear and not giving the trade time to work.
What would happen if your reversed long on say NFLX and TSLA today? Have you considered going over your past trades to see if that would have worked?