Hey guys, I decided to make another journal. The main purpose of my journal is to document my trades and also to give me the added accountability of having to post my trades and my results for all to see. I have a small account, and I will focus on trading the NQ for the most part. I encourage anyone and everyone to comment, cheer lead, heckle, etc. as they see fit, but just so I’m clear, my main purpose doing this is not for help or instruction. I’ve been around the markets and trading long enough to have an idea of what I should be doing, I’m at the stage where I need to put it all together and move forward with some consistency and avoid the big drawdown days. But like I said, I welcome any feedback. Being honest, in the past I’ve had issues with discipline, and I’ve found that it’s often just one big losing day as a result of a breakdown in discipline that blows up my small account. So I’m here again doing the journal to add another layer of accountability into the mix and hope to avoid problems that I’ve had in the past. My starting balance is $1200 USD, not exactly market-moving, but it’s all I have to work with. As long as my wire deposit makes it there, which it should, I’ll probably trade tomorrow. Cheers! P.S. I’ve also recently got into learning C# and programming some autotrading strategies using Ninjatrader. So if anyone wants to discuss autotrading, I’m into that as well.
If you're trading during normal market hours, why not just trade a couple of shares (like 5) of the Q's until you are consistently profitable? Your commissions will be lower and your losses will be miniscule. Right now you're looking at almost 0.5% of your account value just on commissions alone for each trade (assuming $5 round/trip). You must be day trading because I don't think $1200 is enough for overnight margins anywhere, so that's a pretty strong headwind to be sailing into from the get go. My $0.02.
Hey thanks for the feedback. Valid points. I'm definitely going against a pretty strong headwind, no doubt. My commission is $3.40 rt, and my plan at first is to just survive, so capital preservation will be my biggest goal. Off the top of my head, I believe overnight margin for the NQ is $3600 so all my trades will be day trades. I'm continually working on and forward testing my autotrading strategies in my SIM account, so autotrading is another option for the future as well. Personally, I've found that SIM trading or trading with very little on the line has limited value for me.
A spread on near-term AAPL monthly's from today. S July 125 PUT 1.36 B July 122 PUT 0.57 Credit of 0.79