Whoa Nellie. I feel your frustration, but the "next level" will be there a year... or five years from now. Time is on your side. There'll always be an open market and another opportunity. Frustration leads to huge mistakes Max. Don't fuck up. Slow and steady wins the race. I can read between the lines here and you are setting yourself up for a big hit. Scale it back a bit Max. Slow and steady wins the race.
I appreciate the advice dude,i really do, you are probably the trader i respect most on this site, but with that said, ive been grinding for 12 years, i used to have no problem holding on too trades for 5 figures while i was trading systems, and there was something backing my discretioinary trades up. Not sure if that makes sense, but when systems trading was kicking off a thousand bucks a day, i could wait for 2 trades a week, and size in aggressively, and worst case scenario i blew out a week, it just seemed much more passive so i was better at it. But now since my systems blew up and my broker robbed me and i need to rely solely on discretionary trading, i have regressed back to being a scalper, just focused on the dollar amount of every single tick, like when i started trading. I know its a process, but 12 years in it frustrates me i revert to the old habits, how do i get around this when this is the way i learned to trade? I need to get around being a scalper, and just get to a point where im like fuck it, on every trade it works or it doesnt, cause i know im batting like 75% but i kill trades scalping trying to nickel and dime. Thx for the help dude, i really appreciate it like i said, you and a couple other guys the only people on this site i really respect, and really know you know what your doing. It must seem like first world problems when i cry about 1700 but the money isnt the issue anymore, i hate not getting it right. Like you said, size down, but if i size down enough to where i just dont give a shit i end up making less money then i just size in and scalp, so im caught between Iraq and a hard place.
The reason its frustrating is cause i know i could be a 50-100k a month trader again and the only thing stopping me is my lack of discipline, and lack of balls, so instead im just left grinding.
1) Great Journal! Please keep up the good work, it is appreciated. 2) Don't be so hard on yourself: 250 x 1700 = $425,000 a year. 3) Do you exercise? I find it helps me with my drive and ambition (make mental note for myself: I slacked off too lately) 4) Why don't you trade ES some more? or more size? It was your best trade on Friday.
Thx Chuck i really appreciate the response, and the ideas, ill try to answer these 1 by 1 2) its easy to do numbers like that, and believe me ive made this mistake a million times, "Just times what you made by 20 and that will be yor PNL" I used to do those numbers on a 10k day and figure out how i was going to be warren buffet by the time i was 30, lol. 3) I dont excercise but i think your onto something there think i need to do something mid day instead of bunkering down staring at the market it isnt healthy and i become obsessed. In the summer time like now i Golf every day guess you could consider that excercise. 4.) In terms of the ES i am very selective, the ES is the most competitive market in the world so i only take positions when i think there is a very definitive edge, i do make money on ES, lots, but only if i pick my spots. If i traded it every day id lose money, i need to have a major support/resistance area, or an idea like friday where i just thought there would be sellers late day. But for now i sure as hell dont wanna short 2400 after that bounce so it will be a while before i get another chance. Infact with the price action i saw today it leads me to believe the ES is going to explode through 2400 when it goes, i could see 2420 close on friday, maybe might have to think about it long. Thx alot for the well thought out response i appreciate the fact that you are listenning, hopefully we can both make some money together.
Excellent journal by the way. Sharing what you're doing and what you're thinking as you're doing it I believe provides a wonderful resource for those looking to learn. Out of curiosity, what is it about this numbers game that doesn't work? It seems as though you're saying that scaling up doesn't work as well in real life as it does on paper, but why do you feel this way? I don't trade stocks, so perhaps you are limited by what you can buy at a specific price, but with futures, this certainly wouldn't be the case. Obviously, the bigger the position, the bigger the emotional element, but of what you have posted thus far, your entry skills, trade management, and win rate are all very excellent. There therefore shouldn't be a reason why you PnL can't be doubled, especially if you only did exactly the same thing as you're doing but with more size. Clearly the missing element is psychology, but is there something else you feel is holding you back?
Thank you for the kind words. What im saying is you tend to think linearly and trading is not linear, so you have liek a 10k day for the first time lets say, then you go home that night and start having pipe dreams, 10k per day times 20 days a month wow im going to be making 200k a month times 12 months, HOLY FUCK IM RICH!!!! ...... but trading doesnt work that way its full of peaks and vallleys....... like clock work any time i used to set a new high i would then set a new low within a month because it just raised my risk, so my high was 103k one day (was so proud i broke six figures) ,, i remember figuring out how i was going to be woth a billion dollars after that day........but then a couple days later i decided to hold onto a loser, average into it, and lose like 57k (4 times my previous worst loss) Because i got an ego and i thought i was a big shot. Dont know how to say this but trading is like..... welll.... trading..... you look at a stock it goes up it goes down but just kind of grinds higher, thats the way the process works, or atleast how it worked for me....hope that makes sense, if not, dont hesitate to ask questions.
To go further in too depth when chuck said 250 days a year times 1700 a day i just know thats not how its going to work, you guys havent seen it yet, but i guarantee atleast once i month almost like clock work, i will probably tilt off atleast twice that amount on a bad day, so you got to take the good with the bad, its really tough to be consistent day after day without ever having a bad day.
The critical question in my opinion is if this was a result of trading differently than you normally would simply because of the huge up day. It seems that you know exactly that this loss was because you were doing things differently. Therefore, you're not proving that trading isn't linear, you're proving that you change things when you are in a different situation/environment. I think there is no reason why trading couldn't be linear if you're applying the same set of rules and taking into account the natural variation in terms of distribution of trade outcomes. Obviously with discretionary trading, its nearly impossible to be religious with rules and setups, but the weakest link is always what you do next because of what just happened before. If I think about what you wrote above with regards to scalping and holding, you probably won't be able to move forward until you make a firm commitment to one or the other, or at the very least decide in advance how you will figure out whether to scalp or hold the next trade. Since you're already more profitable than most here, you clearly already know all this, but I guess it still needs to be said. The decision to hold for bigger wins needs to be made before the trade, doesn't it? In fact, holding for bigger wins, and having this be a profitable strategy means that this trader is perhaps already happy with a smaller win rate since he knows he makes it back with big wins. The guy who is going for smaller wins knows he needs a high win rate. I think that given what you write, you won't be able to not exit early. Sure you have what looks to be 8 for 8 wins, and some of them really moved if held. But the day you try and hold these will be the day that they all turn around on you and you'll be kicking yourself for not taking the small profits when you had them. Lastly, if you're trying to increase your PnL, what do you think is easier to do right now. Change up how you're going to trade (ie. holding longer, therefore completely changing your win rate perhaps and also your R:R parameters), or just put on more size and trade exactly the same? The money part seems like its going to be a psychological barrier for you. But if you try and get there by both changing how you're going to trade it, but holding longer, which it seems like you don't want to do since you're watching order flow, and also adding in the psychological element of bigger gains, then you're changing too many variables at once. If on the other hand you change nothing about how you trade, but simply trade bigger size, then you will be able to figure out how to get comfortable with the money aspect of potentially bigger wins, and see how that affects you.
Great response, thx for the well thought out response i appreciate the debat. Ill just chop this into ttwo parts cause the first response is easy. I think there is no reason why trading couldn't be linear if you're applying the same set of rules and taking into account the natural variation in terms of distribution of trade outcomes. Obviously with discretionary trading, its nearly impossible to be religious with rules and setups, but the weakest link is always what you do next because of what just happened before. So just to give a quick example i used to be a systems trader, in the first 5 months of 2014 i was up 140k, then pretty much breakeven, until October of that year which is when oil just got completely destoryed, i literallly had an excel spread sheet sending orders to the market at certain envelopes on a daily basis, and i went from 140k in 5 months to puking over 5k a day doing literally exactly the same thing. Systems tend to work for a bit then flake out then work, but this was a spectacular blow up and i was stubborn with it, and then averaring into other shit, make a long story short, doing the exact same thing i made 140k at the start of the year, i dumped more than that in the last 3 months of the end of the year. The market changes, adjust or die, sometimes its advantageous to buy breakouts, sometimes its advantageous to absorb breakouts, it depends on the market, its very hard to say XYZ will perform the exact same no matter what market, infact the only people i know who can do that are high frequency trading firms.