Day 5 Need to work on letting winners ride a little more. First trade would have turned out to be $2,000+ off the start....
Day 6 Could have had a +2k day, but had to go to bed so I can operate with half my brain at my peas and beans salary day job... oh well. Lost money due to not being able to trade, DO NOT CONFUSE WITH RISK MANAGEMENT.
Day 8 Broken rules + refusing to take a loss + triple down (15 contracts) + not enough sleep = -7.5k and closing journal indefinitely. I would keep trading, however, I can't keep up with the 18-20 hr days...
So I am not the only one that makes these silly mistakes.It is just not worth it when we know a clear head keeps us balanced. Maybe you will have better good trading in the future.You looked like you were getting some good profits.
So... I've been trading for 32 days straight, only ESU/Z1. I'm really upset as I am very time constrained as far as how much I can watch the market. This might be the reason I'm having trouble getting past the 20k equity high I made early on in this journal. I'm @ 18k as of today. Account has gone week to week bascially in the 10k-20k range. I guess that's what you get being 'random.' I'm trying to form together more of a plan and buckle down to see how to stop losing the money I make. I've learned a little more and made a few more rules for myself to help prevent big losing days. Several times, I haven't broken my rules, and still lost money. The peeve I have about this business is one day something works the next day it fails you two times as hard. So I try to remember to pat myself on the back twice for those days I follow my rules and still lose money. This is a personal record for me as I have never lasted this long before. I need to keep reminding myself of the progress I've made instead of looking at how much opportunity I miss out on.... ******* day jobs.... I also have TOSmobile on my Android... the quotes are 20 min delayed.......... what's the point???
TOS does not offer realtime quotes even when subscribed to their feeds? I'm with IB and it's all realtime on mobileTWS. I have not found my day job to be a hindrance to my trading, same vice versa. Actually it has improved my trading, as I do not look at the market that much anymore to end up making unreasonable decisions at every move against my position. Instead I simply have my stop in place and everything will take care by itself. The performance has greatly improved since I stopped tracking every tick (which would not be the case if I was trading from home with nothing else to do). It seems you are into trend following with ES, too. Perhaps you can adapt your time frames and style to your job.
I have thought about doing that. If I do I'll have to cut back size to 1-2 contracts at the most. I know the power of not watching the market, it's responsible for my +5k nights. Guess it's time to open an account with IB. Can you view depth of market and obtain tick/time based charts on mobileTWS?