hit the max i'll allow myself to lose in a day and called it quits. i had the right idea on both trades but jumped the gun on each. down 4.75 points on two trades.
all day i felt like this was a really bad day; like i made one horrible decision after another. but since i've had a chance to review i realize my performance wasn't really that bad and the PnL is skewed by one big mistake. don't know what the heck i was looking at, but decided to short around 10:15 @ 1377.75. i quickly reevaluated the trade before it was filled and realized it was the total wrong call. i went to cancel and the order was filled just as i clicked cancel. instead of immediately just cutting out i guess i was hoping for a chance to get out with a half or quarter point. nope. for the life of me i don't know why i let it go all the way to my stop at 1386. if not for that trade i would have been in ok shape today. i was shaken up after that and made another lousy call. decided to get away from the computer for a while which helped. came back and salvaged what i could in the afternoon, although i lucked out on my last trade. it was positive but a bad trade nonetheless. -7.5 pts on the day, -11.5 pts on the week.
Please plot those entry and exit point in the chart. I am not sure why your lost is way bigger then your gain.
are you asking for today's entries and exits? i'm not sure what you're looking for. my losses have been slightly bigger than my gains this week because of several factors. 1.) i panic when my trade turns red and cut out at the bottom. today i forced myself to move my stops back a bit and also give the trades some room rather than watch the ticks like a hawk. it's not likely that every trade will stay in the black for its entirety. 2.) eagerness to get into the trade too quickly. i've jumped into several in anticipation of confirmation, but a narrowing of moving averages is not a crossover, just as a stochastic stalling on a downtrend is not a reversal, etc...i'm trying to be quick but i end up fudging signals. that's a bad habit in choppy conditions like the last couple days. 3.) cyclobenzaprine and vicodin. i didn't really think about it until this afternoon but i probably should have skipped trading a few more days till i'm no longer on drugs. i started having back spasms over the weekend and though i don't want to admit it, my judgment is probably off. i'm down about $650 for the week but i'm not beating myself up over it. i've been disciplined, i'm not overtrading, and most of my entries have been good. they could have been a little better, but i mainly took losses by panicking. i think most of the trades would have been positive if i had respected my stops and let the trade play itself out. one thing i can't decide is whether to constantly try scalping half a point here and there or just catch and ride full trends. my mind changes before each trade and that's messing me up. any thoughts from anyone on how to overcome that would be helpful.
I am going to give you only ONE piece of trading advice. STOP trading the ES. Start trading the SPY or start papertrading NOW. Learning to trade profitably takes a lot longer than you think. It is NOT just a matter of trying for a few weeks. Several people have hinted at this, but you ARE overconfident of your abilities. You need to listen to them. 90%+ of new traders lose all their money. Pretty much in the way you are now. Many compulsive gamblers become that way, because they get a big win or a couple in a row, and convince themselves they know how to win. Then they lose the rest of their money chasing their original LUCK (it was not SKILL). You SHOULD be beating yourself up. You are likely to continue hemorrhaging money, until you no longer have money or confidence to trade. You need to learn how to trade; it takes longer than you think. Eric said, it is NOT about learning how to make money. It is about AVOIDING losing money. You need to listen to this NOW. You sound like most new traders. Or alcoholics who convince themselves they are don't have an alcohol problem TZ
Sounds to me like: You're not following a plan, if you really even have one. In the unlikely event that you do have a plan, you seem to have very little confidence in it, as evidenced by the fact that you seem to only infrequently have trades that you follow your plan. Here's a post that I wrote ~9 years ago that might be useful for you: http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=10115700 You're making excuses, instead of being accountable for your results. You're trading too large of size ("I panic when..."). Successful trading should be such a small size per position that panic is virtually impossible. Each trade should seem almost insignificant. My advice would be to reread the feedback from myself and others in the earlier posts in the thread. Best of luck.
well what do you define as a plan? maybe i have the wrong idea about what it means to have a trading plan but i have set defined rules for my trading and posted them last week. i infrequently trade because i want to keep from overtrading and keep my commissions low. perhaps i'm trading too infrequently. i would panic whether i had 10 shares of a $5 stock or 10 ES contracts and i watch my trade turn red. it has nothing to do with size because i have not put on more than one contract at one time on any of my trades. panic may be too strong of a word, but you have to admit you don't like seeing a better entry after you've been filled. are you sure you're referring to me about the excuses? i've clearly blamed myself for any bad trades. if i have made excuses please point them out because i try to be accountable for my actions in all realms of life.
I'm not suggesting that you publish your trading rules or strategy here. However, this is what I understand your overall strategy to be: "--my system for picking momentum trades is very basic. exponential moving averages on four intraday time frames (2, 5, 60 min, and a chart that switches between 10 min and 2 hour) along with slow stochastics and MACD to help pick entry/exit points. two daily charts with different moving averages help evaluate "big picture," but not necessarily trade direction." Now, if that is your entire plan, it is grossly insufficient. If that is the overall idea, and you don't want to publish the details, I can totally understand that. I suspect that if you have more 'details' for your strategy, then they are insufficient versus the detail you need. For example, if you were to give you wife/brother/neighbor the details of your strategy, and they were to trade in another room, would their trade entries/exits be essentially identical to yours? If not, then I would suggest that you have an overall idea of what you want to do, but are basically 'winging it'. Some traders are successful with that, but it's not what I'd advice for a beginning trader. Let's look at some of your comments from this week: "i try to align my stops with the correct time frame i'm trading, but i'm so used to watching a two-minute chart for entries that i forget to look two inches down to the five or ten minute to monitor my position. i watch the two minute chart whipsaw, i panic, then ignore my stop and manually take a small loss to keep things from getting out of hand. this is what happened with my first trade." => Sounds like you're not following your plan, and making excuses ("forgot to look" "panic"). Successful trading is boring. You follow your plan, that's all you do. Winning trades, losing trades... they are all the same, you follow your plan. No emotion. "i was shaken up after that and made another lousy call." => Did you really make another lousy call or were you following your plan and it was just a losing trade? Don't take losses personally ("I was shaken up"). If trading properly, IMO, <i>you</i> didn't make a bad trade, the system did. <i>You</i> did your job and followed your system. Or did you, that is the question. " i panic when my trade turns red and cut out at the bottom. today i forced myself to move my stops back a bit and also give the trades some room rather than watch the ticks like a hawk." => Why did you move your stops? Did you have statistically significant evidence that the new stop location was an improvement over the prior stop location? Did you change your plan on the fly? It just sounds like you don't have any plan on what you are doing, and are winging it on every trade based upon gut feel or instincts. Not a good idea, IMO, and not something I'd call a trading strategy, or plan. "eagerness to get into the trade too quickly. i've jumped into several in anticipation of confirmation" => Why did you do this? Did your trading plan tell you to jump into the trade in anticipation? Sounds like you are making excuses for getting into a trade that you should never have entered. "cyclobenzaprine and vicodin. i didn't really think about it until this afternoon but i probably should have skipped trading a few more days till i'm no longer on drugs. i started having back spasms over the weekend and though i don't want to admit it, my judgment is probably off." => Are you trading today? If so, are you off the pain killers? If you are trading today, and are still using the pain killers, then it sounds like you were making an excuse for yesterday's performance OR are begin stupid to repeat the same mistake today (assume it's a valid reason to not trade). Bottom line: I'm not trying to give you undeserved crap. However, it sounds to me that you don't have a clue what you want to do in your trading. Until you do, you are likely destined to lose money. Once you DO know what you want to do in your trading, then you <i>may</i> have a chance to be successful. Even then, the odds are against you. But, currently, it sounds like you are floating in the wind, letting the trade urge hit you whenever the feeling is right. My suggestions at this point, develop a trading plan that your friend could follow in your absence and make the same trades that you would make using that plan (i.e. have it be objective, not subjective). Then, develop a sense of confidence that this trading plan is a valid way to break even or better in the markets (backtesting, paper trading, etc), and THEN trade the system in the market using real money. Note that if you had a stock account at IB, for example, you could do your 'paper trading' with 100 share lots of the SPY and not be risking any significant amounts of cash, but single lots of the ES are much more risky. I should add that by posting your results here, you are being accountable in a way. I would prefer to see an attitude such as this to increase my odds for your success: "Well, today was a crappy day. My system made four trades, all losers. However, I followed my plan on every trade and realize that losing trades/days are part of the business. I have tested or traded this system long enough to know that these days are inevitable, and therefore, I haven't lost any confidence in my methods after a day like this. I will continue to follow my plan explicitly tomorrow, and I know that the odds are in favor of tomorrow being a profitable day." Try to get yourself to this level of confidence and attitude, to increase your odds of success, IMO. Also, I should emphasize that having blind and unwarrented confidence in a bad system is not sufficient. You need adequate testing to legitimately develop confidence that your system/methods are good. Once there, you should blindly follow your system and not sweat the P&L on a daily basis. Or at least, not allow your sweat to make the slightest difference in how you execute your trades. Quote from the Market Wizards book: "I don't trade for fun. I trade to make money."
now that was a helpful post. thank you for citing specifics. i'll address a few of your points. it is the overall idea, same as most everyone's overall idea i assume. there are more details but you got me in that i do think they are insufficient. if i wrote a precisely detailed version of how i trade i think someone else would have similar entries/exits, but i still think i'm missing something. my plan didn't explicitly account for emotion. i had an understanding with myself that emotion is detrimental to trading. i'm better than i was when i first started, but i still get flustered and need to occasionally get up and take a walk to remind myself to stick strictly to the numbers. if i don't then yes, i make lousy calls that don't follow the plan. it's my fault, not the system. i have always kept my stops unrealistically tight. my experience has been that very often i get stopped out on what was a good entry because i locate stops poorly. because of these things i decided to adjust my plan and give my stops more room. it wasn't a split-second decision, but when i do deviate from the plan i end up winging it and usually get into trouble. you got me there. why? emotion. again, deviation from the plan and yes, getting into trades that i should never have entered. correctamundo. i am not taking pain meds today so i am trading. the back has improved enough that i decided to stop the meds last night. you've got good points. i haven't been as microscopically thorough in creating a plan as a i should be, but i do think i've done some things right. well, i guess it's back to the drawing board.