I was going to start a journal thread last weekend, but didn't quite get around to it. Last weekend, my 2008 profit was a little over 25K, and I was probably going to title this thread similarly to some of the other threads here (taking X to 10X by end of year). This week has been horrible though. I've lost around 28K so far this week, so I'm down about 2.5K this year. Last year, I had daytrading profits of about 5K, so my total daytrading profit is about 2.5K. I'm dangerously close to losing money. A couple more bad trades will do it.
It's like in the song, "The Gambler"... "There'll be time enough for counting when the dealin's done"... The "dealin' is done" in this game when you RETIRE with the money... until then, it's all still a question.
Man I had some days a couple weeks ago where I made 8 out of 9 winning trades. I didn't think that could be luck. Guess I was wrong.
Best advice is to take a couple days off. Reset your mind so you can start fresh. Otherwise you'll just chase loses with more loses. Been there, done that. I actually took the last 2 days off because I was so angry for not MAIKING enough on Wed. I knew I would get emotional trying to make up for what I should have made and probably lose a ton.
Get what you were doing right back in focus. This can be the fire that takes you to the next level, making 25K a week. Good luck.
Don't trade money you can't lose. If you're taking these huge swings, it sounds like you're very leveraged. Make sure you're not risking too much.
You didn't ask for my opinion... but here it is You posted the OP at 10:08 or whatever. Obviously at that moment you are in a very bad state of mind. Then at 10:17 you posted that you had just taken a further 2.5K loss. Now, it doesn't take a genius to analyze that last 2.5K loss. Then you made this post which suggests that although you didn't think the earlier weeks huge gains could have been luck, they may in fact have been. The implication is that your luck has now run out. However, I doubt this is what's happening. You were trading well at some point, with 8 of 9 winners. Then something happened... betwee your ears. This is not a flame, please understand that. If you had the wherewithal to make 8 of 9 winning trades, you have something going on. I just want you to take a clear-eyed look at what happened as opposed to trying to convince yourself it was a matter of good or bad luck. Clearly, it wasn't. If you can analyze your losing trades and post your entries here along with rationale for entering the trades, I think you would quickly see that the problems started when you took a loss (maybe this loss was more than you should have taken for the trade, as opposed to just a regular loss that is a part of trading, the kind of loss whihc MUST occur), and then your decisions deteriorated from there. Certainly that last 2.5k loss you mentioned was a psychological loss. I have just started watching the markets intraday every day and trading very actively for the past 3 months and nothing I have ever done in my life could prepare me for the gap between what I know I should do and what I actually do. I have never done anything in my life which was anything like this, where I couldn't immediately perform at or near the peak of my ability. Hope you can get back to trading well as soon as possible.
Plain and simple . When you were doing well the mkt was acting a certain way. The mkt started acting differently and you probably continued trading the way the mkt had been acting or changed your trading but your changed style still didn't agree with the different mkt action. Either try and figure what changed in the mkt or wait till it behaves like it was and then trade like you were.
I felt the same way - then got over it when I came out a couple hundred up for the day Wed was my first exposure to that kind of volatility unsettling