If you're single, best thing to do is to get married. Married men have been shown to trade less. If you're married, you will have to have a sex-change, 'cause women have been shown to trade even less. There's a solution for you.
Write down all your trade rules on a piece of paper and check each rule before entering a trade. This will help.
You traded 16000 shares and you're new and you only lost $100 less commissions. Don't be so hard on yourself, that is a low tuition. You cannot make money by not pressing the button. More importantly, at your stage, you cannot learn how to trade unless you trade. Don't do anything ridiculous like take a break to see if you're addicted to trading. Continue to trade daily, manage your risk properly and make sure that you're trading situations with favorable risk/reward opportunities. Additionally, trade stocks that are moving (some people call these the stocks that are in play for the day). There are a lot of stocks to trade these days. I'm in my third year of this business and I'm trading b/w 100k-175k shares per day. There are many guys in my office trading 2 and 3 times that amount. Manage your risk and you will be fine.
No don't stop, keep trading this way and that, don't worry about your utter lack of experience and knowledge. Then let us know when you have wiped yourself out. This will be excellent for you because you will win a really big thread where hordes of other losers love to write endless posts sympathising with you. LOL.
ok. but you didn't say how many trades you made. i imagine that to define "overtrading", you'd have to know how many trades you should have made vs the actual count.
16K shares of what? If we're talking about GOOG, you're trading way too much capital for a newbie. Scale back and trade your plan for a few mos till your automatic with your setups. Then slowly scale up. It's amazing how someone making money trading small amounts will suddenly lose when they start trading larger due to the psyche effects.
Whatever you're using for a setup and trigger, focus on a higher timeframe than what you've been using for execution. Don't even look at the shorter timeframe charts (minimize them if you have to) unless there's a higher timeframe setup in place as well. Then look for the entry on your execution timeframe. It'll reduce your number of trades and have you focusing on more reliable higher timeframe setups too.
Hi, Garbage Can Ray. When I was a newbie, my focus was only in short term, day trading. But after a few years, I switched to trend following, and is MUCH better, now I let positions open for days or weeks. Stress is not a problem anymore because I have a sound risk management and I don't start to sweat when a corection happen. Now, for me, trading is boring and its so much better because I can make many things with my time.[of course, after I make my analys and make diferent scenario, aka "trading plan"]. So, my advice: forget about day trading, because in the long term your health is much important than money. Also I think that in trading for long term, and of course use scale in/out is much more profitable because you can catch big moves and if you start to add to winning positions, then you will be very rewarded. English is my second language, sry.