Congrats on your 15%. See you at 74% by year-end. BTW, if 300 trades/quarter is intense, what would you say to someone doing 300 trades a day?
04/18/2009 Weekly Update for week 14/50 ended 04/18/2009 Dreadful week, down 67K (18%). Lost my tenuous gains for the year and more! I was served notice of this on Monday when I lost 31k shorting BAC and other financial stocks with leverage. Struggled the rest of the week to claw my way back, and basically achieved that by Friday morning before tragedy struck a second time. What the heck is SLG? I didn't know the stock, only that it has shot up too much. Decided to buy 200 APR 20 PUTS, and averaged down another 300 on expiration day! Well, I got my head handed to me as the stock kept rallying to the close when I was out at an average 23cents/contract. Total lost 52K! Total disregard for due diligence on a stock heavily shorted and down 80% from a 52-week high of 102, and basically not the type of liquid stock I should be trading option on. Will spend next week trying to get back my sanity and see the range of changes to make. First off, I am going to automate closure of positions averaged down on. My positions monitor should not allow initiation of further positions on a current position after the initial position is taken. I haven't done a thorough financial analysis of the impact of averaging down on my results last year and this, but all the signals I get is that it has severely dented my performance. Good night. Code: Opening Balance: 369,212 Net loss for the week -67,092 ------------------------------------------------ Net Balance: 302,120 Number of Trades 24 Number of Profitable Trades 14 Since Inception of Thread 01/10/2009 - 04/18/2009 Opening Balance: 320,064 Net gain (Less Margin Interest) -17,944 (Down 5.6%) ------------------------------------------------ Net Balance 302,120 Number of Trades 332 Number of Profitable Trades 209 Top/Bottom Discretionary Trades for the week TICKER ENTRY DATE/TIME EXIT DATE/TIME QTY PURCHASE AMT SOLD AMT GAIN/LOSS TYPE CME 2009-04-15-10-41-37 2009-04-15-12-00-38 4000 940550 956414 15812 LONG ------------------------------------------------ SLGPD 2009-04-17-10-08-08 2009-04-17-15-09-21 50000 63470 11650 -52619 SLG PUT
Successful trading is boring trading. With your grand style of trading you should be on your knees thanking the trading gods that you are only down 18%. I am not saying your strategy is impossible when it comes to making money. I am saying however that almost all successful traders have tried it and almost all of them have moved on to more conservative and less emotional methods. Risk the life of your account daily or start being responsible? I always thought that was a pretty easy choice.
As we ALL know there is very little truth in this statement. Its never too much unless it hits zero. Do enjoy your journey though.
I would give neke the same words of caution, although one always lives and dies by the same sword and so some things are inevitable. Giving back 4 months of gains in one week is a big red flag (as are some of the position sizes taken for daytrades). But hey, the thread is 320K--> 3.5mil, isn't it? Do you think you could do it with say, a max position size of 100K per position and/or 1000 shares? I'd say it's definitely doable. I think forcing such a limit upon yourself would be helpful in minimizing "leverage as edge" syndrome. A final reminder: taking 30K to 300K is alot easier than 300 to 3000 - especially mentally. The intraday timeframe is just not that scalable unless you are trading indices. Take some time off and regroup. PS - hope you're not serious about the thread title as a do or die goal.
neke, Don't be discouraged. There is plenty of time in 2009, you can achieve your goal! Maybe you should do more trades, like Red_Ink. He dug a hole of 60k in the morning and climbed out of it and furthermore ended the day with +17k. I don't know how he did it, but the guy is a superhuman.
So I take it -18% weeks are normal for you? Do you even realize how irresponsible that is? Do you even realize how fast that would blow an account? Small picture traders who live with the hopes of riches after 240 trading days are pathetic.