run some stats on 50 or more of your well documented triggers to get an accurate idea of whether you have something there that can be used as a system of rules. funky wagnals defines discipline as something like ...system of rules governing conduct or activity. Now, with no system of rules, how ya gonna decide to follow them or not? you have no discipline problem. But do you have a well defined system of rules? If you decide to wing it, so be it, that's your choice. Many do and they like it just fine. You will want to know which camp you are in.
Finally, a profitable day. It's been a while. Only made 11 ticks with 2 trades, but they were both taken well, I think. Draw down of 1 tick and 2 ticks each trade and 52 ticks and 83 ticks potential, so I caught a good entry for a trend, just didn't have any confidence to hold them. I've been thinking about this. I don't know if I'll ever have any confidence to hold onto trades for a trend, because I can't seem to stay in a trend. However, I think I might be able to accurately scalp around the areas of a trend beginning, and if I can do that then maybe someday I can enter with 2 contracts and hold onto a trend, or maybe I will have made enough of a cushion by scalping 6 to 8 tick trades that I won't mind the risk of holding onto a trade for longer. For today, I am really happy to have trades that went in my direction a little bit, after so many losing days in a row.
Minus 5 ticks today. 3 losing trades and 1 winner. There are 2 issues I keep having that I need to fix. The first is that I need to stop trading when the Euro is not trending. Solution: Draw boxes around congested areas and work at recognizing them as ranges and not trends. The hard thing about this is that it seems a trend will start from this area, so try to learn what that looks like. The second is that I'm not reading pullbacks to a trend very well at all. Solution: Really focus on trying to recognize where to enter a pullback and when to be confident that a trend will continue. If I could learn to trade pullbacks, I think trading would be a lot easier and very profitable. I attached a 1 min chart showing the types of pullbacks that I'd like to learn to trade. I usually lack the confidence to get in because either I'm not sure when the pullback is done pullingback or I'm not sure the trend will continue.
Made some changes to my 1 min and 5 min charts to emphasize some indicators more than others. They look easier to read now.....can't wait to trade with them tomorrow.
Made 2 ticks!!! It's been a while since I've felt so happy over only 2 ticks!!! I'm having a problem with entering trades with too large of a stop loss. If I'm likely to close a trade for 4 to 8 ticks, then my stop loss should be around that size, but I often don't know that a trade might go 4 to 8 ticks until it moves and needs more like 14 ticks for a stop loss. All my trades I always hope will make lots of ticks....20 or so would be nice, but I'm not accurately calling trades that large yet, and even if I were to, I'm much more likely to close the trade too early than to take the added risk of waiting for it to make 20 ticks, especially with the way the Euro doesn't usually move in a straight line. Could have closed out my first short trade for 11 ticks but I held on, wanting the bigger move I thought might be there, and not really wanting to move to BE because my stops ALWAYS get hit there...so, I moved the stop loss down by a couple ticks to another "safe" location.....that turned out not to be safe at all. Where it stopped me out would have made a nice place to have entered for the drop. Now, if I could just read when it was going to touch there and then keep going in the same direction, that might be a money maker entry.
Lost 20 ticks. Today's losses were my fault. I was impatient for having waited all morning without a trade and so began to take risky trades. What could I have done better? I need to get into the habit of asking myself what is leading me to taking this trade. Is the motivation because there is a clear set up? Or is it the impatience of wanting to trade? If I can see that it's just the desire to get into a move that might happen as opposed to being highly likely to happen maybe I'll stop taking the trades that aren't great set ups. Now I wish that what I was writing in my journal for today was that I hadn't taken any trades at all today, or that I had waited for the clear trend down or up that started at 8:50 am CT this morning. My goal for next week: Wait for clear signals in a trending environment.
"...decided to trade in the direction price was moving." If trading in the direction price is not moving hasn't been working out for you, maybe you should give this a try.
Good Idea!!! Oh wait, trading in the direction price is moving is already in my trading plan. Why haven't I following my plan?????!!!!!
Perhaps your plan has too many moving parts and it needs to be simplified. What is the setup? What is the trigger? What stop loss strategy would keep you in the trade while the probabilities are favorable and take you out when they no longer are?
“Perhaps your plan has too many moving parts and it needs to be simplified” Good point. I was letting too many voices go off in my head when trying to make a trade, kind of like trying to walk before I can crawl. I think I’ll go back to working on my most basic setups for now. To help with this process I’m going through my trades starting from a month ago, trying to see how my setups are working in those trades and recording the results to use for refining my plan. Was I following my plan, or thinking I was, but not understanding the different factors going into the setups? Why didn’t the trades work, or if they did, how could I have stayed in the trades longer? So far, it’s been really helpful. It takes a little thinking through, but I can usually see where my thought process was and why they did or didn’t work. It’s time consuming, so might take the rest of the week to get through, but I think by the end of it, I’ll have a clearer picture of what is working and I’ll have a better, simpler plan for trading. At least, I hope so. Thanks for the suggestions!!!