I had a very poor February, though according to my strategy (trades) I should've been positive. Now in the first few days of March I decided to take a step back and trade a bit less but all I've managed to pick are mostly the losing trades of a system that picks 80% winners. I now remember why I gave up full time trading a decade ago, but more importantly any advise on how you overcame a bad run, when did you restart trading again and under what conditions. Sincerely, losing my mind!!
Maybe, time to review your trading system. Chances are good, you might not even have an edge in the stockmarket. If you have a trading journal, review your trades over the weekend. Go thru each losing trade. Quite possible, you will see the same mistakes repeated over and over again. Focus on minimizing those mistakes. Compute your Expectation using the formula. If you have negative expectation, you will have to discard that trading system. You are just gambling. Find a trading system that works for you and is positive expectation. Even an 80% win rate does not guarantee positive expectation. Example, you win 8/10 trades or 80% but, you win $100 each time. That is $800. Now, you lose 2/10 trades but, lose $600 each time. Do the math. You lost $400 in those 10 trades while, winning 80% of the time. You had negative expectation.
I feel your pain! I had a bad losing streak the same month I got married. As if the stress of planning and pulling off the wedding wasn't enough. My son even commented on it during the wedding reception to all the guests. Great. My recommendation is to reduce your bet size dramatically. Depending on your personal financial situation, you might not want to stop trading entirely, although that depends. If you have a system that picks 80% winners, then why are you not trading all of the signals so that you win 80% of the time? (Also, that statement doesn't cover the average win to average loss or, in other words, the expected value, which you don't share but is important. I'll continue by assuming you have a positive expected value, an 'edge.') If it is due to the constraints of capital, then you need to see how you are selecting among the trades to take. If your expected value is truly good and your statistics are solid, you should choose to take as many of the trades your system proposes as you can (within the constraints of proper risk control) and - if that's not all of them - then select the subset randomly so that your subconscious biases don't interfere with a statistically sound system. Alternatively, you can narrow down the number of trades by trying to find a statistically significant covariate to weed out some of the trades, but that's probably not the most important issue at this point. Most importantly, however, I suggest you need to take the time to very carefully see if you have over-optimized your strategy so that backtesting appears better than live results will be. This is a common error and it will ruin your account if you don't actually have a real edge (ie positive expected value) in live trading. *IF*, after careful examination, you verify that you have a systematic approach that has favourable statistics and is not over-optimized, then you can dip in with a smaller bet size than usual, and slowly increase your bet size as you regain your confidence until you reach the optimal bet size given your risk constraints (most likely much lower than "kelly"). Being emotionally able to follow the rules of a profitable system is very important: better to bet less and correctly than too much and incorrectly. Edit: After re-reading your post, it looks like you might be selecting fewer trades to take as a way to reduce your trading right now. I would suggest taking all the trades but doing each one in smaller size, if that is possible with your account size.
Stick to your system, but do the opposite of what it tells you! JK Step back. Take a few months to clear your head and get back to some kind of baseline.
If you lack confidence in your system, you wont be able to trade it. Lack of confidence, when you take a large drawdown, you will crumble. Basically then at that stage you are buggered. During large drawdowns, I'm buying.
Market is fighting with itself = no continuation. Recession incoming. Maybe, fading false breakouts could work.
%% LOOKING @ some [not all] of your post , looks like you are better than average trader; noted your buy TQQQ post, i'Ve done that plenty over the years. BUT FEB, while it has a buy on TQQQ don channels+PSAR; i never use PSAR alone + frankly the best uptrend trends will smash the upper channel/no wonder IBD like$ buy 52 week new highs. I lost money on FEB, UPRO+[ SPXL around $108,strangely a 3 year chart chart closed with $108 area.] 80% is nice but almost always that system takes small profits\ i sometimes trade SPLV when finding a bottom area [or want to lose less , on average] it tends to give smaller losses + profits even when you let them run/LOL. SO i did trade SPLV some in FEB, not MAR. Wisdom is profitable to direct.