Drop in a small position just to get a feel : It breaks the Ice for your major position and will remove the sudden change in emotion/market view that a large position can cause Works for me
Write on a paper all the reasons for taking the trade: this will automatically force you to be patient . Apart from kidding this is serious . I am myself lazy and it is only by using automatic constraints than I can drive myself to do something I don't like. I also consider that it is brokers idea to make believe that paper trading is worthless (worthless for them for sure since there are no fees ). Paper trading will oblige you to be patient. I consider that a beginner that doesn't want to do paper trading has a gambler's mentality. A champion of formula 1 doesn't train by doing competition most of the time he is training out of competition. But paper trading must be done honestly. When I see the number of people that want to know all the cheats about a playstation game I guess that they will have difficulty to paper trade by being honest with themselves . This last remark only reinforce the value of paper trading since honesty - not in the moral sense but in the integrity sense - is also a quality for trading for as I said in the thread "Trading in the mirror" introspection is part of a trader's activity on his road of progress. Without intellectual integrity he will never be able to judge himself objectively. Last but not least, even being a veteran, it can be sometimes useful to return to paper trading when experimenting a new method or market. It has also the advantage of cutting the addiction danger of daytrading.
I believe i read in your journal you have an w/l ratio of 33%. That makes it mentally very hard to take every signal as it comes. IMO you should improve the w/l ratio. Another thing you might give a try is programming an alert in your charting software when an entry point shows up.
I have $50K capital, I have near 10 losses in a row but only lost about 2% of my capital. But a trade that lost $40 could still scare me off! I think I need to have more courage to trade. Any suggestion?
the obvious answer is that you are not confident. most people are shy or hesititant when they are unsure of something. imo, the only way to change this is to slowly gain confidence over time. it won't happen overnight. when you start to really believe in yourself and what you are doing, you'll become less afraid/hesitant. here's a quote: "When you know, and know that you know, confidence replaces fear." - ?
I think everyone who trades the system has the same problem I struggle with it for a long time and still battling today, and I have doing it for years.. the final solution is to let someone else automate it for you. that's will solve all your discipline problem.. I personally didn't take this option because I figure I will overcome my lower instincts that I inherited from the damn reptiles with enough conditioning and someday, I will just become a robot that doesn't feel pain and doesn't have a ego..well..I got better over time but I still misses once in a while when all that billion of evolution catch up with me and my reptilian brain take over.. My suggestion is to you is let someone else be the robot, the conditioning option is too painful the ordinary guy..
I'm not sure if this may be applicable to your situation, but when I examined my "hesitation issues" when I started trading it came down to one simple thing for me..... Lack of control. In my past career, I was always had a high degree control over the ultimate outcome of my endeavor. I was able to direct the process using both tangible and intangible skills. Now, the market could care less about my skills or personality...I am a nameless, faceless micro-entity. What a blow to the ego! As you know, in the market about all you can do is try to stack the probabilities in your favor. This is why you spent time developing your system or strategy. Ultimately, you do not control what the market does after you enter a trade...once the trigger is pulled the process will play itself out and control is gone. This was hard for me to adjust to initially. What I did was say to myself that "Ok self, you've made your choice and you can't control what the market will do BUT you CAN control the ultimate result. You control where you take your profits or cut your losses. By switching my focus to taking control of the trade rather than the market, I was able to enter trades more easily and direct my "control issues" to managing the trade. Believe me, it was not any easy adjustment for a "type A control freak" (as my wife says.) There were many times that I sat staring at a set up and saying "what if my set up doesn't do what I think it will do...." What I was actually saying was what if I can't control what will happen? Well guess what, I can't, so I now control the controlables which to me is managing the trade.
Just a thought only: Perhaps your (profitable?) system is still too young, and likely far from its maturity. In this case you need to use/risk a very minimum amount per trade in order to test/prove/improve/modify, constantly and thoroughly, the (being) developed system after every (calculated) loss (of course using stop loss orders). Simply decisively learn bad experiences from various mistakes that could be still hidden and beyond your current understanding. Consider the worst scenario would be to completely drop the existing ststem, and develop a new one based on the (good and bad) experiences learned during the process. Only a highly profitable and fully real-time tested system would build up your confidence reliably, in both the system and yourself.