I make both winning trades and stops regularly, here's lessons learned from recent stops. Situation: back during the market selloff I was up $9000 net profit, successfully swing trading small size (20 - 100 shares at a time) inverse ETFs like SQQQ TVIX UVXY . I then lost several thousand trying to bottomfish them this last month. Although I'm still profitable on the year, I could've done much better if I wasn't stubborn. I own my fckups. Lessons learned: I should've done ETF arb swing trading, like VXX/SVXY TZA/TNA and not been a stubborn permabear Price action is all that matters, despite pandemic and unemployment and earnings misses and common sense saying market should've kept selling Don't fight the fed Buy what goes up at 2day highs, sell what goes down. Don't overtrade, especially due to fomo Sound familiar? ... I did correctly manage risk, trading small with conservative stops, but still added up. .... I'm still bearish and am scaling back into SQQQ VXX SPXS SOXS SDOW TVIX etc, just more cautiously
Bottom fishing just gets you smell fingers. Brush it off and Learn! And stop having an opinion on bullish or bearish, play the setups mainly based on Risk to Reward and that's it. If market followed common sense, we'd all be rich, it'll always do what hurts Retail the most.
And if you don't use margin so you can with stand the dips and if the market always goes higher eventually then it's the perfect system to gain wealth. Ofcourse it needs wealth in the first place as it's a slow method.
Is price action or the Fed more important ? You're still in the game. You've learnt lessons. You're up yearly. Great !