In my other journal, I used to be much more patient waiting for entries, and much less patient with suboptimal positions. Now it seems like I have to force myself to wait for good setups, and I am much more likely to "give it more time" to work out. I used to say that the best way to make a one point gain was to find a four point trade and to just get out after the first point. Somewhere along the line I forgot that. I need to increase my filter size.
"All discretion takes place before the trade is opened, after that, pretty much autopilot." I hope you find this method rewarding! It has helped me in many ways. The best thing is I am no longer totally stressed out! (Only partially stressed out.) Remember you can put as many "if...thens" in the plan as you want, the trade can still be very flexible... you can use all of your trading mojo... just that all the "if...thens" have to get put in *before* entering.
SLD 1464.5 CLOSE 11:09:43 Stopped out. I normally don't use hard stops, but I'm going to try it for awhile.
SLD 1474 CLOSE 12:12:02 Patience paid. I was getting extremely frustrated, but I was trading from a protectionary stance. I had my stop in at 1464.5, and I was preparing to potentially exit at 1467 if it came back down.
I'm going to take a break until 1:00. The market is playing around with its 50 day moving average, and while I don't necessarily believe in that kind of thing, I'm certainly not going to mess with it.
So far I haven't seen anything that I thought was worth the risk. I would like to get another two pointer before the close, but I don't want to give up any of my current profit for today. I may end up doing nothing.