I always flashback to this song about SIM when the topic gets brought up. "I'm going in ... to SIM city, I'm going to win.. in SIM city"
Worst trading since journal started happened on Tuesday. The day after i managed to walk away from a $1000 loss on Monday with minimal contracts. I started out Tuesday with like $100 profit in asia, then decided to trade the EU session (thinking i can recover some loss). That's when it started to fall apart for me. Wasn't expecting a continuation up trend (was stubborn and ego took over), and definitely wasn't expecting almost equal range day that day (+1000 ticks). so losses i took in EU session was affecting me mentally. The need to recoup back losses crept into my mind and i kept going and going. So the bad trading extended into US session. I finally decided to cut it after few hours but at a huuuuuuge loss. My account was sitting at about $4k end of tuesday. Looking at the back to back 1000 tick days, i decided to put back the $2500 withdrawal i took last month in order to ensure i can still manage to trade the next day with breathing room. Wed-Fri, i traded smaller, and the range was still large that i was able to recover some losses. You can see the significant difference in commission size on the 3 days. Being able to make that much shows that the range is that great. The main trigger for me was not adjusting size when the range was hitting 800 ticks plus. My loss of +100 ticks per trade really screwed me over mentally due to the size i traded. It was hard to see the losses removing significant profits you made So the LESSON i took from this is that i came up with a size calculator based on the current range into the session. I dont' think i would've tilted with smaller size . The bigger losses triggered my fear to recover and I traded more and more instead of just stopping like monday. technically down 6k for the month. I think the main issues i have is just purely mental. Knowing how to stop trading when you're down at some point is the skill/awareness I need to develop. Strategy wise, i think it's pretty solid. the sheer range of this monster is making me rethink of becoming a member now. You really don't need more than few contracts to make a killing with NQ when it starts to expand (usually beginning and end of the year). PS in my 2 years of trading NQ, i don't ever remember seeing back to back 1000 tick days..it was really making me mentally puke haha
You need to take a breather, as your blotter is looking tenuous. In your two years of "looking at NQ", you have never seen back-to-back 1000 tick days. Yeah, no shit. That is the effect the triumvirate of Trump/Xi/Powell has on the markets. Back off the NQ, or yer gonna' get torched. Hit the micros for now until this trade war dust settles.
I have watched many of your videos and have actually screen captured the final few minutes where all trades are displayed on the chart. Kudos for sharing so much. One of the things I see is that there isn't too much consistency. I think you said in some video a while back that you're trying to take more profit than what you risk. (ie. 1:2 risk to reward). But I don't see this in your videos. Its barely 1:1 most trades. What I also see is that you're all over the place with regards to where you will take profits, and where you have your stops. Perhaps this comes from the market and they are technical levels and such. But from a purely statistical standpoint, when you go changing it up this much, you're just guessing what is right for that situation. Sometimes your risk, or drawdown on a trade, far outweighed the profit that you took. Its amazing that this has worked well for you thus far. And what I really commend you on is having balls of steel. You have shown a great amount of resilience. But of course the trouble is that your worst day is always just around the corner because of some of these issues, as can be seen by your huge losing day. The thing is that if you put certain caps in place (ie. 2k loss limit on the day and you stop, tigher stops on trades, more rules about scaling in losers, etc), then this will lessen your wins on many days, which makes the equity curve not go up as nicely. You recovered nicely from that previous drawdown in July, but this one turned out to be even bigger. Its one thing to say that in a given year, you expect 3 or 4 bad days which will kill a week's worth of profit each. This would be acceptable. But because the way you're trading seems to be sometimes random, I'm not sure if you can put any logic to this. You're either close to blowing up, or close to hitting 100k, and its hard to tell which. Like I say, the more rules you have, the harder it might be to make nice profit days, but at the same time, the huge down day probably would not have happened either. I'm not sure if your problem is just as simple as a position size issue, but I say this without seeing the bad day. I absolutely admire your guts and perseverance, but sometimes what you're doing seems a big random and more down to luck. Luck ran out on the 6th. I hope you can build a bit more structure.
Hi hilmy83, That overnight trading session (European session) for the Emini futures was a continuation (Up) after it started in the Asia session. Therefore, you said you were profitable in the Asia session...it implies you did such via going Long. It would then imply you had Short the European trading session and/or added too many contracts to those Short positions to suffer that worst trading day as you call it... Revisiting that problem of adding to a losing trade position while fighting the trend. Do you have a recorded video of your live stream for August 6th Tuesday or timestamps of trade fills from the history in your CQG platform ? I ask because you said the following... I agree with what you said above and it makes sense in hindsight or after the fact. Yet, at the same time, as that trading day unfolded for you in real time...there may be an issue with your trading plan that's allowing those mental errors to occur in your trading. The only way to know is to either live stream all your trading days that includes an opening view of your vwap or whatever you're using in your trading plan. This will allow others to be able to see if you're following your trading plan or abandoning it for whatever reasons to then just take random trades or random position size management because you're not able to control your emotions. It's impossible for the viewer to really know if its a bad mental game (skill/awareness to know when to stop) as you stated or there's a big flaw with your trading plan that you're having problems adjusting to it on high volatility trading days. On the surface, it seems its a psychological reason for you because you keep mentioning it in a way to ensure you do not need know if there's something wrong with your trade strategy & position size management. Yet, there must be a reason why you shut off your live stream on Tuesday or you never made a live stream on Tuesday. The latter would be less likely considering your strong belief that live streaming will help you with the goal of a CME exchange seat. Thus, you must have recorded a video because to not do a recording would imply you knew before the fact you were going to have a bad trading day (worst trading day) and then decided you did not want any documentation of that worst trading day. I doubt such occured because it would imply you have a crystal ball that tells you when you're most likely to have a bad trading day. That's the trick with the psycho mumbo jumbo...you gotta share that worst trading day beyond saying its a "worst trading day" the same way you share your best trading day or normal trading day. Yet, you don't want to risk your hard earned money if the viewers can't verify via your live stream if the problem is with your trading plan or as you continue mentioning...its the mental game...that psychological stuff or both. What was your trading performance in the high volatility months of February 2018 and Oct - Dec 2018...high volatility months ? Rephrasing the above question...did you blow 1/2 of that 70k in 1 day of trading in February 2018 or between Oct - Dec 2018 ? Simply, you may want to take a closer look at your history of big losing trading days to see if a large percentage of them occurred in high volatility trading conditions. If you discover that they do occur in high volatility...you will then have a crystal ball of when not to trade (don't turn on your computer) until volatility returns back to its mean or normal. Its a great way to minimize drawdowns and bring more consistency in your trading. P.S. Its very unusual or rare for a retail trader to get an exchange seat on the CME so early in their career as a trader of the Emini futures. I've never heard of anyone doing such nor documenting such via live streaming on their way to a seat on the exchange. Looking forward to more of your documentation of your trading. Thanks for sharing. wrbtrader
Really sound and useful advice by both seaweed and wrbtrader! It makes me think I might also stream my sessions and invite them over. It's funny how you seem to have the complete opposite problem I have. I did great early this week, and was surprised you were still fighting that trend since I did not see any signs it would change direction. However, yesterday was terrible for me. I always entered the "trend" only to see it go against me immediately. Maybe I should focus more on trying to avoid these days and let you take the profits home. Good luck and thanks for this journal/your YT channel. It helps me a lot too.
Did you actually have a 81 % drawdown in one single day or do I misread? If yes, I think it's time to pull the plug and do some more homework before more live trading. It seems like you're largely trading from the hip. In the long run - that means your account will blow. In some other thread I think you said trading was boring and that you didn't have anything to do when you were done for the day? Seems to me you have a lot of study and research to do moving forward, so there's no reason you should be idle.
First great journal. I actually signed up for an account to post. 1) Reduce your size when the market is volatile and widen your stops. 2) Use Kelly criterion to manage your bet size. If you have a large edge it will show very soon. If not, you won't go bust before finding out if its true.
The problem is you may not know beforehand if market will be volatile today.When you know it, it is too late and you already lose big. My best guess is , OP does have some edge, but there are flaws in his system.At least there are two: one is related to leverage; the other is related to emotional control. Big loss is not so important as flaw of system. If you can fix the flaw, there will be easy winnings in the future. If you can't fix the flaw, even you don't take a big loss now, you will in the future. A better system would be: 1.entries and exits are pre-determined, so risk and reward are pre-decided; 2. decisions are made by parameters, there are not much emotion involved.