I know this has to bother other traders. I do a trade, exit at target, make money. Then it moves more in the right direction, and I "could" have made more. I try not to look at the trade after I exit, but that is very hard to do. Anyone else... I am sure I will hear how I am a greedy trader and be grateful for my profits,,, etc...
Yeah man, I'm losing 100s of trillions of dollars every day because i'm not buying at the lowest and selling at the highest on every single trend
Ahhh...hindsight...woulda, shoulda, coulda. I Could have made more. I could have had no loss. I should have. And this entire cycle repeats itself for you for every trade. You're just mechanically gambling and not understanding the greater, wider, dynamic picture of trading. You'll continually beat yourself up and fantasize about perfect, sexy, scenarios. You need to Unlearn your Targets and books of trading. Those are dumb, limiting and outdated written by impotent teachers, academics.
As long as you are consistently hitting a good R:R ratio, you should be ok. Just forget about money 'left on the table'. If however you are grabbing small profits relative to losses, that's unlikely to work in the long run unless you can pull off something like a 80%+ win rate.
you are correct .. my trade today was a nice $1200 profit/ 53% on SPY calls... that is awesome... but this "woulda, coulda, shoulda" thing is human nature. Alot of trading requires us to unlearn our human attributes.
because maybe there are others that experience the same thing.... this is suppossed to be a community of traders helping each other. What I see is alot of traders bashing others on this site..
If I get 2pts, that pattern is done for the day, if I get 1pt, I can take another trade of same pattern till I net 2pts for the day. When your losing % get low enough, add volume. A ten lot on $500 a week on ES is decent start to better vacations. More patterns you design same deal. Good trading is not making huge profits once a week, it is being consistent making singles or doubles. Then add size.