March 25, 2015 When I started my blog I promised to share the good but also the bad. And there is always lot of bad days in trading. Even the best traders have bad days from time to time. For traders the bad day usually means that he lost a lot o money. And since I promised to share everything, here it is - the biggest loss per day since I started this round of live trading: T1 was very premature and I was not able to close it sooner. T2 another premature entry, this time even worse than the previous T3 I catched this one very high and of course the following stop run hit my (widened) stop loss T4 long in YM, quite good, but I couldn't withstand the market noise. My profit target was exactly at 17910 where the market eventually climbed T5 and T6 were ok trades, but I took them too prematurely and I again couldn't withstand the market noise so I closed both T7 stupid T8 stupid T9 and T10 both prematurely From the beginning I saw that the markets are falling and not behaving normaly. In that case (if you are not already in the market from the top) the best position is to sit on your hands and wait until the market callms down. My stubborness costed me dearly. $309 to be exact. Expensive lesson, I hope I will learn from it. What is even worse I broke my money management rule (max. daily loss $150). So what do I do now? Nothing. I will continue to trade as if nothing happened. It may sound stupid at first, but if your trading plan is solid (and mine is, which was proven by SIM period), than the only thing you can do is nothing. I wouln't try to cut the drawdown because it would make me more aggressive and that is something you don't want to do if you are losing. Quite the opposite I will try to take just the best setups and trade with more caution.
...or you could stop being stubborn and "go with the flow", so to speak. Your trades are countertrend to the point of absurdity. Stop fighting it, dude!
So after a loss I should completely change my trading strategy, right? No, thanx. Even when I really made stupid trades yesterday, it is not a problem of the strategy. I don't expect you to understand so the further discussion is pointless.
Real money, makes all of us do stupid things at times, got to get over it i guess, haven't been able to yet but hey Trend has its issues aswell, it changes to often. And its no fun, if it's too easy
March 30, 2015 I am slowly regaining confidence after last week's fiasco. Today, I reached my perfect daily target after 30min of trading. T1 was a mistake. I took the trade too early. After I realized that, I quickly closed the position at BE+1 T2 I picked the highest high 6 ticks from high. I didn't want to risk anything and took quick +9 ticks T3 I went long after I saw struggle of bears to push the market lower. +10
April 9, 2015 Today, market was testing my patience... and I succeeded. There have been literally just couple of good opportunities. I missed one of them because I couldn´t react quickly enough and then I didn´t want to chase the market so I let it go. I ended up with a single trade. T1 After I saw that I am not able to enter the market with limit order efficiently I opened this long with market order. Very quick trade (30 secs) with 2 ticks heat. +12
April 10, 2015 Very low volume and almost dead market today. The whole day was again about patience. T1 Even when I was expecting the market to move higher and thus having a long bias, this short came from my preplanned zone after I saw buyers fading out. I picked the local high pretty good but because of low volume in general I also didn´t see enough sellers comming in. I decided to close the position at BE+1 T2 This was again few ticks from local low. I had just 2 ticks heat. MID and low provided barrier to hide my stop loss behind. Soon after my entry the market rallied. Having the low volume in mind I aimed just for the closest logical target which was 9 ticks away in this case.
Week 15 results My goal for this week was to regain confidence. I was trying to trade just the best setups with controlled risk. I was trading just 4 days (Tuesday till Friday). Most of the time the markets have been quite slow, specialy on Friday. I had 3 winning days + loss on Wednesday. Except Wednesday I had 100% win ratio (Wed just 33.33%). The total profit is not very impressive but it is the first step towards recovery from previous period of bad weeks.
I’ve been there, and I don’t think the idea of “regaining confidence” works well. You lost because for a specific period of time, you failed to properly understand the market action, and you also failed to readjust. Now it seems that you are doing better at both, and it should be the time when you push your edge and take more risks, so that you can make more to make up for the future losses. The total P/L is a function of how much you gain when the market moves in your favor vs how much you lose when it’s not.