My high school summer job: trading the NQ

Discussion in 'Journals' started by zdawg164, Jul 3, 2008.

  1. good luck buddy
     
    #51     Jul 7, 2008
  2. OK, let's break it down to how my first day on the job was.

    In short, it was a shit day.
    I reached my maximum drawdown of $110 dollars at 11 45, 15 minutes before i would normally finish.

    As you will see in my chart, I made 9 trades in the hour and a half that I was on the computer. Probably for the first 3 trades, my heart was pounding at an immense rate, and I was so fearful that when the first trade, for example, hit my intended stop of 1.5, I held on until until I had a 2 point loss.

    What I was also pissed off about was the potential profits that I SHOULD have had, but didn't. If you look at the chart at 18:07, my system told me to short right there. I was so afraid of a loss that I did nothing, and left about $60 from reaching my pocket. At 18:18 the same thing happened where I could have had about a 1 point gain, but did nothing out of fear and doubt.
    And yet another circumstance happened on my last trade where my system TOLD me to short at 40.5 but NO I waited a bit and came in way too late, which resulted in my last loss.

    Another issue was going against the good ol' proverb of letting your profits run, where if I had waited just 10 more second on one or two trades, I would have had a profit of 2-3 points instead of .5 points....

    Anyways, I would appreciate any professional critique possible about what the fuck I did wrong today.

    In a way I'm calm because I know it was my first day, and people DO have loosing days, but from my explanation you can also understand why I would be disappointed.

    P.S My account is now at $1890 if you didn't catch that before.

    And the pink triangles on the chart indicate an opening of a trade, blue indicates a close
     
    #52     Jul 7, 2008
  3. Sorry you had a rough first day. Don't want to say I told you so, but this is what I mean. You have no idea what if feels like to really trade, and are going to make all the stupid mistakes that everyone does when they first start out. 2k is not enough. Look at this it is day 1 and you are down 5% of your account. Don't make the mistake I have of thinking you are special and aren't gonna suck at first like everybody else does.

    My advice to you again is to save up 4k-10k if you don't have it and get in with a prop program that can train you to trade. You need to learn at this point, and you aren't gonna be in the game long enough with 2k to learn. Get in a situation where you can trade 100 shares and lose 5 bucks on your bad trades and you can really learn.

    Again best of luck!
     
    #53     Jul 7, 2008
  4. yz125

    yz125

    9 trades in 1.5 hours with +$4 comm thats where you went wrong
     
    #54     Jul 7, 2008
  5. hello zdawg164 this is a trading setup for scalping... enjoy:D
     
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    #55     Jul 7, 2008
  6. Ooh how'd you do those cool annotations in NT?
     
    #56     Jul 7, 2008
  7. Oh and stop calling this your job. That is ridiculous. If you survive you should be proud, and I mean that. You run the 2k to 25k you can start talking job.
     
    #57     Jul 7, 2008
  8. dcvtss

    dcvtss

    Now you know why sim doesn't translate to live trading - no emotion. Best of luck.
     
    #58     Jul 7, 2008
  9. Woops, say bye-bye to your thread, zdawg.
     
    #59     Jul 7, 2008
  10. LOL. Yes! His post was deleted, and my thread will live to see another trading day.

    OK, everybody who has been following my short adventure so far. As I told my mom the good news, it really got me thinking that I'm not the so called trading genius that I thought I was. Maybe I am, who knows. I'll be a junior next year, and for these past 2 years I always thought that I didn't REALLY need school and that I could just coast through life by trading. For both my freshman and sophomore years I was basically getting all C's. Once again, this was my first day so I don't know how this all will play out.

    Originally, I was planning on having a maximum allowed loss of $1000 and then I would quit for the summer. Well, I think that max loss will now change to $400. I think if that happens, the best thing for me would be to completely ignore the market (maybe I'll read news but definitely NO PAPER TRADING) for the school year, and pick up the pieces next summer.

    I'm hoping tomorrow will be better, and that I will make some $ like I did on paper. I know that I made some dumb mistakes today, and I'll try to work on it for tomorrow. Speaking of commissions, I found out my commission is $4.8 per RT when I THOUGHT it would be $4.3. I'm gonna have a serious talk with my broker seeing as how he told me that for my volume it was gonna be the latter price.
     
    #60     Jul 7, 2008