Hey lex, long time no speak ... I've been reading over everythin for the past couple weeks and I want to ask why you felt like moving up contracts? increasing your position size doesn't mean you have to increase your risk amount, in fact you should rarely change your risk amount per trade, it should always be based up per tick. so you should gauge your max loss, usually for people who scalp or trade off the 1 minute charts, something like .1%-.5% of your total account and then base the amount of contracts off that. This does a number of different things LL....for one, it eliminates the psychological effect of trading with more money at risk, so you don't feel the pressure of higher position sizes, since you already know the predetermined risk amount every time. and two, you won't get wiped out when you've been performing well at one size but then step up and 3 or 4 bad trades in a row wipe out all of the good you've done with the smaller size. Risk management and money management are the two most important things of this game...they say most traders spend majority of their weeks breakeven to down a little, preserving their capital, and waiting for those 1-3 weeks where they make a killing. Don't get frustrated, just step back take a lot at your setups, what you did wrong, what you did write and objectively analyze it. also spend more time with your trading plan constructing sound money and risk management sections. If you want to view a sample of mine or just some other overall questions about it feel free to contact me or let me know. Good trading to ya!! dubs
Thanks for your post 4DTrader. You quoted 2 sentences out of my first post in this thread. However that is not how I wrote it. I did say that my goal was to be consistently profitable in April. I then wrote: If I am satisfied with my trading results I will increase the number of contracts. If not I will quit trading. So the decision whether or not to continue trading was not based on profitability but on whether I was satisfied with my improvements in trading. In my posts from end April & beginning of May you will find my trading results and the reason why I continue trading (at least for now). And yes, I was profitable ... LL
I was helping you simply your thought process. If you reach your goal, you are satisfied. If you don't reach your goal, you are not satisfied. Therefore, reaching your goal=being satisfied. Don't tell me you are satisfied when you don't reach your goal.
I understand your reasoning but that's not exactly how I see it. In my opinion there can be circumstances when you are satisfied even though you haven't reached your goal. For example a rookie trader who starts out with a big loosing week, followed by two slightly profitable weeks could be satisfied because he managed to learn from his mistakes. So even though he might not have reached his goal he has improved his trading considerably and may therefore be satisfied. Regards, LL
Hello everyone, friday's result was +37 and I am pleased to have ended the week on a high note. Here are the daily results fom last week: Monday: -48 ( not -68 as I posted on monday) Tuesday: -85 Wednesday: -1 Thursday: +13 Friday: +37 Week: -84 It took me until mid-week to get used to the new software. And to be honest I am still not 100% comfortable with trading 2 contracts. But I expect to be profitable again next week and hope to regain the points I lost this week. Have a good week-end everybody, LL
Hi dubs, thanks for your post. The reason for increasing my contract size was that after 4 consecutive profitable weeks I felt confident and wanted to move on. However I may have been naive in thinking that doubling the number of contracts would not affect my trading. Although I have no problems in honoring my stops I now tend to take too many small winners. I do not have the patience to let them develop into big winners. As I said before this is exactly the same problem I had when I started trading with one contract. During the past month I learned to control this problem but now it has reemerged. However I am confident that I will get things back under control this week. It is really helpful to step back and analyze what you are doing. Thanks for your help, LL
For the most part of today I was doing extremely well. I was up 65 points and on course for my best ever day. But then I chased a trade which turned into a loser. That marked a turning point. I completely lost my focus and all discipline went over board. I only managed to end the day in the green thanks to a 29 point winner near the end. Looking back this was the third time in 6 trading days that I blew all or most of my intraday profits during the last 2 trading hours. I am not sure why this is happening. Over confidence after several profitable trades could be the reason but I am not convinced by this. I am now asking myself if it would be a good idea to stop trading for the day after having reached a predetermined profit amount. But I don't think that really makes sense. Why would you stop doing something if you are successful? Does anyone of you stop trading for the day after having hit a certain amount of profit? Today: +14 Regards, LL
Exciting trading day with many ups and downs for me. I even hit the wrong button once (buy instead of sell) and lost 12 points before I could react. Just like yesterday I ended up slightly positive before commission and slightly negative after commission. This is obviously frustrating because some day I would like to make money in the markets instead of just being a good client for my broker. I have made some improvement in being more patient with winning trades. However I feel like I am still overtrading. So I will try to work on those things for the rest of the trading week. Regards, LL Today: +10 Week: +24
Another exciting day in the markets today. I stopped early today to watch the champions league final Although again I have not much to show for I am still pleased with today's result. I was down 45 points in early trading and still finished the day up 17. Today: +17 Week: +41