I'm kind of disappointed in myself. Today should have been my day. I've been waiting for the market to breakdown from 1520 for at least two weeks, and when it finally happened I panicked. I was afraid, plain and simple. I should have known that once it finally broke, the move would be fast and furious. But to tell the truth, I lost faith in the short sellers because I thought they were too scared to do anything. Did everybody really need the Fed meeting to see that it was headed back to 1500? I'm not trying to blame anybody, because this is a recurring problem of mine. I'll see something early and then get frustrated beyond belief when it doesn't happen right away. By the time it actually happens, I've already given up on it. If I can ever figure out how to get past this, I will be unstoppable. I will sting the market time and time again for everything it's worth. I will let the market do whatever stupid thing it wants to do, and then when it has exhausted itself and can no longer stand under its own power, I will swoop in and hit it with everything I've got. If the dip buyers want to run the market up from 1530 to 1550 on a whim on Monday, I won't fight it. I'm not going to fight it anymore. I'm not going to fight anything anymore. I'll just let them provide me with better entries. This was the first time I've ever held through a Fed announcement, but I figured there was no way I could lose this time. I think that made me a little too nervous though, and screwed me up for the rest of the day. I thought it would gap straight down to 1510, but it took 10 minutes. I've got to stop letting myself get screwed up when things don't work exactly like they "should". When it managed to make it all the way back to 1510 the second time, I figured that I had been foiled again and that going long was the thing to do. So I pissed away an hour of some of the best movement I've seen in a while for a couple lousy points. I'm still down 10 points for the week, which means I still suck. But maybe I'm getting some understanding out of the deal, so it might prove to be worth it. Why would the market gap up today? I saw it coming yesterday afternoon, and got out of my short. Sometimes I used to feel sorry for people who lose money to me. Not anymore. They cause me so much aggravation that I definitely earn it. Soon enough I will transform myself into a panther. I will let the market laugh and dance along the path, oblivious to the coming darkness. When it is so weak from its own drunkenness that it can no longer stand, I will pounce from the shadows and maul it to pieces before it even hits the ground. No more will I let myself lose because no more will I stand in the market's way. This actually makes perfect sense though, because if the market never did anything idiotic, there would be no opportunities for trading. It sounds obvious, but until your eyes have been opened, you don't really notice.
AB, No matter what you think of, there will always be clowns that mess it up for you. After the FOMC, i was short at 1524, i watched the market drop to 1520.50, where it met buying pressure, so i lowered my stop to BE, of course i got stopped out, right after that it dropped like a brick. Seeing that got me so aggrevated, that i didn't trade any more today.
That type of story happens to me more often than I care to think about. It seems every time you grab profits, it takes off without ever coming close to a BE stop. But, if you move up to BE looking for another leg it turns and gets you.
At least you used stops. When what you described happened I lifted everything, including my original target. I figured that even if I was wrong, there would still be enough opportunities to make it back to breakeven, and I was just going to give it until 1:30 to play its games.