Bad entry point. p.s your trading settings in meta.xml has to look like this [Mindset] givingupallowed=false good luck
You are lucky, you are not in deep sheet (like others, who are in deep debt after an oversized trade on margin gone wrong), you can easily take a step back, take a timeout, try something different, make some good money with another type of job. Retreat, regroup, and then, if you still feel the wish for it, you can always back after a while, refreshed, with a new perspective on that whole thing and give it another try if you want.
How are you going to be mentally focused when you were trying to do so today and failed? You have failed for the year and failed last year, I don't mean to be attacking you, but being blunt, you not changed. This tells me your system is incomplete, you should know in minutes or bars of how much time to give a trade, look at your system as programming language and your brain as a PC chip, you can't be vague to be consistent. I did breakouts long ago, they have years where they work well and not so well, so your reward to risk has to be greater reward, has to be defined to take off half shares then you have more shares and trail a stop. If you "belief" for continuation, based on well defined reasoning and not "just cause I feel it". Jumping around and "trying" something else without much back testing so you can see why it works or why it not working, too many jump around and lack consistency. I don't know of anyone who ever said they attracted to be successful that is difficult, so this tells me to have other reasons to trade than many tons of money. You don't have to be great to make a pile of money, matter of fact, it better if no one knows you exist. The ones who dream come and go, and the ones who work thousands of hours and disciplined have much better approaches. Asking the forum how we trade, you have a mentor and now you are jumping around? You need to design completed well back tested methods on your own by hand and then you learn price action, I learned by making my own charts by hand for 20 years, up close and personal on what price is doing. at how many cents or percentage do you know price going wrong way, what you do when you recognize megaphone pattern, what about when bars turn 2.5 times ave range of last 9 bars, do you buy out of inside bars, what is "mean" swing of FB in up trends or downtrends, all nuances, and better you know each the better to can profit, and many more. Stop trading is not a failure unless you don't come back, get a job and build up account and in free time develop a system what works for you. Swing trading very much risking less and rewards more, sitting here 6.5 hours trading then another 8 hours working on better learning each bar, to learn to intraday trade? Yeah. Automation way to go.
Someone else called it pretty well, this guy is probably codependent and the mentor is probably a faker.
As close as he is to his mentor, you would think he would have figured out by now, how he trades? Mentor seems to be a day trader. Day trading is not for everyone. Tried it and was not good at it. Found I was better as a swing trader which is what I do now. Seems too that he uses a lot of discretion on his trades. Most times, you do the opposite of what you should be doing! A trading plan with rules should be part of your guide to handling your trades efficiently. Rules that you follow and bring structure and order to your trading.
@TheDailyTrader Ok look, I don't want to be mean and I also don't want to kick other guys balls here, but here are the facts: 1. You are talking about your "mentor": Do you actually know that this guy is making money? Have you seen his results? If so, does his methodology make sense to YOU? Chances are that he's some guy who "teaches" BS that he collected from the interweb and bombards you with truisms. Warrior Trading, Bulls of Wallstreet, Sykes?? IF he makes money, does his trading appeal to you? If a brain surgeon told you "hey, this is hard, but doable and everything you have to do is like do a little cut here, then take the saw, make another cut there"...you get the picture. Would you really do it even though you know that you faint when you see blood? 2. Did you do your homework? Did you write a journal and did you record all your trades, thoughts, findings, results and did you review them on a regular basis? If not, get yourself tradervue.com and record every trade there. At least you will have some stats if you're too lazy to hand write. Find common themes in your losers and winners. There is no other way to improve than this. 3. You are trading way too large. I find it crazy that you even ask if you should trade only 100 shares. You Sir should not even trade 50 shares. Plowing through 7k tuition fee...that would have been way too expensive for me. You have no idea, what you're doing, so trade the smalles amount possible. 4. You have zero edge. ZERO. All you do is brabble some TA terms but you have no idea why a setup works and how. 5. There is no reason for you to trade at the current stage. You are not profitable and you won't be in the near future. To see at least some light, you will most likely need three years of daily deliberate practise. If you can make it this far, you'll see serious cash after 5 years. So to think that you'll turn around in a couple of months is a pipedream. You will look for a part time job or a night shift to pay the bills. You will put your funds into a savings account besides what you need to trade the absolute minimum. Even 10 shares will do. You will journal every single fking day. You'll write down, what the S&P did, what gold did, the 10 biggest stocks, treasuries, VIX, oil and copper. After that you'll do an analysis of the daily chart of your market that you will trade, you'll write down the news of the week for that stock. Only then comes your trade idea...written down, of course. You'll be finished 15 minutes before market open. You trade ONLY WHAT YOU HAVE PLANNED OUT IN ADVANCE!! and once you've finished, you copy/paste your executions into your journal and write down what you did well, what did not went well, any surprises that came across. ...and then you shut down your computer. You will not browse for setups during the day, you will not trade anything that you have not prepared in advance. Do this every day for 6 months and you will see significant improvement. Sounds like a lot of work? It is. I did this for every single trading day during the last 10 years and it is the only reason I'm still alive.
Everyone is different. Maybe, just maybe, you can't trade like your mentor. I know myself pretty well, so I can tell you, for me, I can't trade multiple instruments. I look at one or two and get to know them well. I set daily losses and stick to them. I set daily targets and stop when I get them. Since you don't have to make a living, then you have time to get your plan together and stick to it.
Relax... your 25. I just found ET a few months ago and made my first post yesterday. I gave up daytrading years ago... not for me, I don't have that skill set or temperament. At 25 you have something many of us don't have... LOTS of time. I was in my early 30s when i made your mistakes so you are more advanced and have the ability to get out of your own way faster than I did. Margin calls, adding money, trying to fix my system on the fly... sound familiar? Take 6 months to a year off and find a job that leaves you a lot of free time to read. Read a lot. Learn a lot. Figure out what kind of trading you want to do and follow the advice here or in the books that appeal to you. Make a plan. Disclaimer: there are a lot of charlatans out there selling their shit so that is why I recommend reading a lot. I focus on swings and position trades. I am not a giant killer. My goal is to beat the S&P and understand my money well- not just trading. Losing 25k might seem like the world to you right now but if you make it at trading one day you will look back and appreciate what you learned (you will likely learn that you didn't know what you were doing or at least didn't know it well enough). On the positive side... your carry forward losses will help you later in life when you are in a higher tax bracket so there is that. Scared money rarely succeeds in the long term and over trading a 25k account is brutal financially and can do massive emotional damage. Good luck! Admitting you have a problem is the first step!
fail fast and cheap! find a decent backtesting engine, read up on proper way to stage b/tests so you don't create faulty backtests ie overfitting, looking into future bars,etc. then take a subset of the test and cross validate against a tick by tick simulator like thinkorswim ondemand then trade w live $$$.