First of all stay away from the markets in order to preserve your account. Secondly, be totally honest with yourself, and ask yourself if you have some underlying emotional pain you haven't dealt with. This usually seems to be an issue with compulsive traders. Maybe you could be just an adrenaline junkie, and in that case go and do some high adrenaline activity such as "base jumping" or whatever to get your fix and to satisfy your action seeking part. But if you want to trade profitably, do some psychological clearing work, learn to meditate, learn to start thinking in probabilities, develop a trading plan and follow it (and from time to time make adjustments if necessary). And hey, if it makes you feel better lots of traders have over trading problems, they just don't admit to it. By acknowledging your weakness and by seeking solutions, you've taken a step in the right direction. Grab some books on trading psychology, and concentrate on that, the markets will be around when you come back. If you don't address your psychology now, then your trading career is over because it is only a matter of time before you blow everything. All the best
I agree with the above posts that you should reduce your position size or stop trading money until you can resolve these issues. Have you considered that it might be that you don't have confidence in your strategy (system etc) and therefore your subconscious mind realising that you are essentially gambling is doing exactly that. In my experience, having confidence in a strategy and understanding why it works makes many of these "discipline" issues dissappear.
You seem enjoying to hunt any kind of preys that come in front of you within any distance. It's not going to efficiently work that way.
UPDATE ok, so after identifying the problem yesterday which is just a basic lack of control over this compulsion to want to make trade after trade. i thought about it for a while and believe it really helped me to understand that this is my only issue so that i can focus on it exclusively. so i did so today, with pretty good success. all day the movement sucked for me, i made 4 trades up untill 3:00 or so because the market just wasnt in my favor.. then when it turned i got in took my money and was up 2k. i should have stopped there because then the compulsion kicked in a little bit and i made two losing trades that brought me to +1200 after commish. after that i said. wtf! im doing it again! and closed my computer, didnt even care wtf the market did, i left. so that's basically it. i just need to trade very slowly and wait for the market to come to me. i tried to force myself after every trade to wait at least half an hour before even scouting for setups. went well and will continue to focus on controlling these ignorant impulses. appreciate all the comments, even the negative ones!
The impulse to take that bad trade is coming from a different brain structure to the bit you need to be using. Add things that keep you in the rational part. Denise Shull's ANNA will help. Also you might try a script that you read out every so often to keep you focused on the right things. Plus a script that asks you to run the check questions before you enter the trade. Reading the script pulls you from emotional impulse to rational questioning. Information on this stuff can be found in this thread: http://www.trade2win.com/boards/general-trading-chat/29598-useful-things-i-ve-found-net.html
I mean this with all sincerity -- model your mood and mental problems with discrete time markov chain. After each trade you make, log state transitions and trade outcomes. Over time you should adjust your "mental" stochastic matrix to minimize long run probability of being in a disaster state.
You have to learn to wait. Once you figure out that waiting is more profitable than not waiting you will be fine as long as you have the ability of seeing simple trends.
Great post! I lose money whenever I venture into scalping during the trading day. I find that boredom and/or starring at short term charts for too long can trigger an overtrading compulsion in me. As for correcting the problem, I am not sure how realistic are these "just don't trade" advices in this thread. What do you learn by not trading? You'll come back in 1 year and will still have the same problem. I think the 1st step in correcting the problem is to recognize that there is a problem, which is what you have already done, and next step is to remove the triggers that cause problem. I would start by what achilles28 says to "Use longer term time frames for setups". You'd be surprised at the results.
i have been trading for a relatively long time now (not always for a living since i haven´t been psychologically apt for it either much of the time, or just didn´t want to) and to me it seems this guy from market wizards is still right: you get what you (your deeper subconscious) want from the market . in your case it doesn´t seem to be money, but you have another need to be filled. another option, but less likely since you are telling us yourself you already know what is the correct behaviour, that you just aren´t skilled or knowledgeable enough.
I agree with this 100%. Wait for your highest probability setups, then put on the trade. If you miss an entry, don't chase, just wait for the next strong setup. I suggest you pick one or two stocks to trade exclusively for a day. This will have several advantages: 1. It will force you to be patient, because strong setups won't come every few minutes. But when the setups come, they will very likely be profitable. 2. You will have time while waiting for the stock to set up to confirm short term support and resistance levels and compare them to the 30-day levels. 3. You'll have time to draw trend lines to find good entry and exit points (see my journal - NoDoji's Day Trading Log - and chart post today for a good example of this). I mainly followed 3 stocks today, and although I missed several entries by not pulling the trigger fast enough, I ended up with 2 out of 2 profitable trades. I'm a pretty new trader and I learn something new EVERY day. The biggest thing I've learned is patience. Eventually the confidence to get into more trades, more quickly will come with ample market experience. (What a crazy time to learn to trade!)