Decided to start trading an hour later in the morning. The main reasons are that often there is better price movement after the NYO and I keep missing out on being able to trade it because I either have used up all my losing trades for the day or I made a little bit of profit and don't want to trade anymore because I might lose it.
Worked on looking over the charts yesterday, but didn't write out specfic details. There's a lot of factors behind the set ups I have and it will very complicated to write them out. I do plan on it though. I feel like I need to pick just one type and only trade it and get good at it. I changed the emphasis of my charts yesterday to accent the longer term trends so I wouldn't be so easily sidetracked by small retracements. It looks good on the charts, and I thought I would trade using it today, but every trade except the 4th one for the 5 ticks each went against my new look. What's really frustrating about today is that it's obvious, looking at the chart after the day is over, that there was a perfect trend up. Why I don't see these days in real time and why I trade against them is a puzzle to me.
I'm considering taking a break from this journal. It's been helpful to me to write out my thoughts each day but it's been hard to show my failures and I need to be able to mess up and know it's ok, nobody needs to know. My hope is that I'll begin to do better and consistently follow my rules, then come back to posting here and this journal will serve as a way to help with staying focused and documenting my improvements. Hope my time away isn't very long.
Update: I've been trading the 6E, ES, NQ and YM and found that I'm consistently better on the YM and ES, so they are what I'm focusing on. I'm planning on posting on here every couple of weeks to show some highlights of my trading and post my progress.
Final Update: I made some progress last week. I'm trying to trade the ES with the same system that I used for my trend trades that did really well in March on the NQ. On Friday it seems like something finally clicked and I began to see where to take the trades that follow my system. It felt like I had found the rhythm of the market and even got 8 trades in a row that I closed for 8 ticks each on the ES. I've been working on just getting good entries on the ES before I plan to focus on letting them run and managing them. That seemed to work well when learning to trade the NQ, and that is how I've approached learning the ES. Friday had some very promising results. However, I've lost interest in posting in a journal. Thinking about how my trades will look when posted has become stressful for me and it's become very distracting when trading. What's funny is, it used to affect me in a positive way because I traded more carefully because I wanted to be able to post good trades on here. Well, somehow that changed. Thank you to everyone who posted in this journal and helped me along in this journey.
Self discipline is very much required in trading. Follow your rules and strategies consistently Keep on working on yourself until you become disciplined.
Well, nothing ever goes as planned, especially in trading. While studying charts of the ES today I decided to compare them with the NQ. This is something I've done many times before. But this time it became very clear to me that the NQ is likely the better instrument to trade. I had thought that by switching to 6E or ES the slower movements of those instruments would help me to overcome my tendency to lose self control when trading. That may still be true, but the ES doesn't have as much potential for trailing a trade or entering as easily, especially if using a market order. Once again, I think I'm going to switch instruments. Hopefully, this will be the last time and I'll finally get to fine tune my trading and reach profitability. I think I may start posting on here again. I'll try to pick up where I left off on trading the NQ and hope I haven't lost the ability to trade it. I think I learned somethings from both the ES and the 6E while studying them that should help a little with the NQ too....basically, watching how the 6E trends (even though I never did catch any of the trends) helped me to want to learn to keep a trade on for its full potential. The ES had a certain way of moving that I think exists on the NQ but is harder to recognize....but now that I know a little more of how the ES moves, I think I will read the NQ a little better. So, I'm going back to how I was trading the NQ in March. With one exception. I'm going to be very careful to not lose self control when trading. Now that I will be working with an instrument I'm familiar with, the stress of knowing I will post my trades here is mostly gone. I'll see how it goes...if I go through another long streak of losing, I may take another break or just stop posting my trades. I'm feeling very confident about this decision. I think I really had shown improvement in the month of March, and I'm excited to try to pick up where I left off.
Really love the NQ. It was so nice to be able to trail my trades today!! I won't be including today's demo trades in my trading stats or this journal because I wasn't using my method. I was trying to see how correlated the NQ was to the NYSE TICK and the NQ TICK. Occasionally the NYSE TICK added some insight to where the NQ was headed, but for the most part, it wasn't correlated enough to give me anything helpful. The NQ TICK seemed to have a mind of its own. With the NQ TICK I tried oscillators, moving averages, support and resistance, above/below 0, or a reversal after an extreme to find something reliable that could predict the NQ movement, and nothing worked. If there's something useful about it, it's beyond my ability to find it. Now that I've had a day to find that these aren't worth pursuing, I can start back to my original method tomorrow and hopefully not go off on any more rabbit trails. And I've decided to allow 1 micro NQ trade with a maximum of 20 ticks stop loss to be traded in my live account every Monday. Doesn't mean I have to take a trade, but it does mean I have to stick to the rule of only one trade. I'm not quite ready, as far as reading price action, to go live. However, I do think I might be close. And I've been trying for such a long time to be patient to wait to take live trades until I'm ready, that I thought this was a good compromise. This should help by giving me the experience of handling the pressure of using real money, but in a very small and limited way. The primary goal is to be able to focus on following my rules while using live money. However, the live trade was not exactly aligned with my entry criteria, although it was close. I had been very distracted with having to set up my charts for NQ, since some things I've changed slightly since spending time on the 6E and NQ, and so wasn't as in tune with the price movement as well as I needed to be. I'm sure there will always be a reason for why a trade wasn't placed exactly right, but I think finding those reasons and working on them is what will help with getting better.