I'm not sure this is a good idea. I try to hide in the ES journal mostly. Going to try a journal of my own to track one new Topstep $50K combine. How long will the journal last? As long as this account lasts. I could blow it tomorrow. I signed up for it this morning. The cost of the combine was $49. If I pass the combine, the cost to activate the funded account is an additional $149. Hence, "What good is only $198 if you want to be a day trader?" If I can reach payout stage, then anything paid out to me over $198 is profit to me. NQ is my usual market, but this account will be ES trades. If I blow the account, so be it. It wouldn't be the first time, and probably won't be the last. Let's see if I can follow some rules and make some money. PS Sort of already broke a few rules. Today it worked out. Hope to be on my best behavior. I'd like to get this journal past day 2 at the least.
You don't need to keep blowing up accounts. Short of some black swan, blowing up an account is a decision. If you're breaking your own rules, you need to take a hard look at both 1) your rules (if they're solid, you wouldn't want to break them) and/or 2) your personality (the best rules in the world won't work *for you* if they're not a good match for your personality). I've seen in the ES journal that you can trade very well, you don't have a dilligence or intelligence problem. So find a way to do more of what works and less of what doesn't. I'm rooting for you. Best trading to all.
100% @Picaso and my problem is I don't always catch the bad decisions I'm making until the harm is done. I know all too well my main trading wrong is that I tend to size up too much for the capital I have at any given moment. This is what happened to me last week. I had taken a large payout from the prop accounts which left me only a $2K margin for error. I got into a short trade that moved right away in my favor, so I added, then I added added added. Thena sharp reaction before I had adjusted my stop loss took me out of the game. Had I been sized right, not only would I not have blown the accounts, I'd have made a huge profit as the NQ then continued to drop several hundred points lol. My second most frequent mistake is a form of revenge trade, when after a loss, I am tempted to jump right back into the noise without instead waiting for a signal. My rules are solid. But I am still a monkey-brained hooman, to borrow from @TrailerParkTed. I do have intelligence. But then there's that evolutionary remnant of the lizard brain wrapped in a monkey mind. After blowing up last week I did a deep dive review of my trading since October, which is when I really feel I turned a corner, and even allowed hubris to lead me to believe I had the chimp in a cage where he couldn't hurt me anymore. One thing I found is that by and large, FOMC days are my worst day of the month. Lots of small frequent stop outs. The FOMC days where I've done well were those where I traded more once the market became unfrozen after the announcement. I don't trade afternoons much, so that was a big reveal for me. One new rule I set is no trading on FOMC day before the 2PM news release. I am sticking to that one and I'll be leaving my house soon to drive into my office, far away from my trading rig. Being able to work from home is great for day trading. Working from home is very dangerous if you are a day trading degen. No trading for me today. I have a conference call tomorrow that starts just as the stocks open up at 9:30. Unless I get a set up in the premarket tomorrow, it's possible I don't get trade again until Friday morning. tbh, picasso, if trading were as simple as simply doing what we are supposed to do, we'd all be decamillionaires. This is such a mindf*ck business, if you ask me. But maybe it's just me. But I doubt it. I think it is all of us. I just had another thought about this and you're 100% right. I used to read a guy who was posting on reddit about two years ago. He was smashing it, posting his Interactive Broker p/l's, four and five figure profits day after day most days. Never worse than a four figure loss. Some days he didn't trade at all, or just one or two small losses and he said he was done. People always asked him what he was doing. He had a very simple method that had to do with some sort of bands or channels, some kind of indicator. He always said "I don't decide when I'm going to trade, my indicators do." He shared his method and for the life of me I can't even remember his reddit username much less his method. But I knew that as much as I tried, I never could trust an indicator like he does. I feel better using plain bars and price levels I get from the daily and weekly bar charts. It didn't matter that he was making more in a month, and sometimes more in a week than I do in a year at my day job. I couldn't trade his method at all. I sometimes read here at ET someone saying how they trade or showing a chart and how its the only way and all that, or putting down someone else's way of trading as wrong or whatever. You'll never here a word of that from me. I feel that there are as many ways to crack this code as there are people trying to crack it. Most of us will never get there. But who are any of use to tell someone else that there way of breaking the code is wrong? Each of us have to find out own way to unf*ck our monkey minds.
Imho, adding one or twice is good (particularly at the beginning of a expected move) because it increases your potential payout (at the cost of increasing the likelihood of being stopped out at a trailing BE stop). Beyond the second add, though, I've found it's better to treat any additional add as a separate trade, preferably in a different, but related instrument. Say enter long ES, add once or twice, and then, if you feel the trade still has legs, it's better to start a long NQ or YM, or 10 MES, or whatever that forces you to treat that position as any other trade, instead of gambling away your open profits (and exposing yourself to some serious damage if you have some nasty slippage or start messing with your stop). This is a bit similar to Laissez Faire trading several mirror accounts, psychologically it helps. With your permission, I'm going to totally plagiarize this, ROFL No, man, we're all struggling one way or the other. I've mentioned many times that my problem is I'm too risk adverse (I may have used the word "pussy" once or twice ) and I'm seriously underleveraged. But that's why we're here, right? To vent, get some emotional support and maybe find an idea or two that we can put to good use? Just keep in mind that the market couldn't care less about you being in a hurry, and that the most powerful force (regardless of how tempting scalping may look) in the market is time. Keep your size in check, avoid the blowouts and if it takes you a couple of years instead of a couple of weeks to make XXX $, so what? And now let me go see if I can click the increase size button Best trading to all.
Commissions, spreads and market volatility will quickly eat up this capital. It's more realistic to focus on training, a demo account, or accumulating a larger start-up budget.
$198 is the cost of a funded account assuming I Pass the cobine. The drawdown allowance is $2000. The cost of the combine was $49. If I pass the combine, the cost to activate the funded account is an additional $149. Hatery's gonna hate lol
Day 2: This is going to be my only trade in this account today because I have day job stuff I'll be doing for the rest of the day job hours. Just to give an idea of how I've been trading, I trade off levels. Most of the time these levels are off the daily or weekly bar chart, levels that were daily or weekly highs or lows. I also trade of the current day's high and low, or, as in this case, I'll trade reversals ta the high or low of a clearly defined range. Outside 5 minute bar at 7 AM this morning and the low that came 20 or 30 minutes later, which was a green to red test of yeste3rday's settlement price. On a 1 minute Ninjatrader chart you can see what I saw. I entered using a market order in when the bar with the yellow arrow dropped below the low of the inside bar whose low was the high of the range I had marked. The profit target was both a money target (6.25 points which is my favorite ES money lol) and it was the mid of that range I drew. And that is how I trade. I look for levels and trading ranges, and use a 1 minute chart to help me judge whether my trade will be a breakout or a reversal. I am also using a sort of mechanical/mathematical method on this account as well. But when a set up that has been good to me for some time shows its face, it is hard for me to ignore it. Also, I knew I would not be able to trade during the regular session today.