Anyone else suffer from this. I had the best day trading today I have had in a long time, 100 points on NQ trading one contract.. really really good. I decided in my weekend review that my plan this week was to only take trades from 6:30AM - 9:30 am PST time. I have stuck to the plan, but cannot stop looking at my damm screen and see that I would have doubled my profit for the day on trades after this time frame. ARRGH... Breath,, let it go,,, do not chase.. anyone else suffer from this??
Some people want to trade all day, some don't. Will you miss setups if you take the afternoon off? Of course. Will you sometimes give back the mornings gains in the afternoon? Of course. Decide what you want to do and do it.
It is called missed opportunity. Looking at it backwards it is called opportunity risk. The ones who hold trades for far too long incur both! To answer the question... No. The planes, trains, and buses are all operating. Oh look, there's one now! Good job John9999! Now, if you must, go wash your car.
I have decided that for this week I am not taking trades outside of the first 3 hours and I am sticking to that plan. MY biggest goal currently is to stick to my trading plan NO MATTER WHAT. I have the stats to back this up... my win ratio goes from 39% to 62% when I filter out my trades that are entered after 9:30 PST ( 11:30 chicago for futures)...the trades of after my 9:30 cutofff are only a win % of 27%,,,, but of course on the very first day I put this plan into action I would have done better to trade all day...
What is special about this week that you've decided to only trade the first 3 hours? When Friday comes, if you look back and see your strategy "woulda" been great each afternoon (EST) of this week, will you change your plan, and decide that afternoons are ok again? Or how about if the next 2-3 weeks are great in the latter half of each day, will you then readjust your cutoff time? If the answer is No, and you've made your latest cutoff decision based on results from a statistically significant amount of trades (in your cutoff time period) over several consecutive months, then it's irrelevant if today, this week, or even this month "woulda" been great. Looking back at my long term results, the expectancy per trade is same from mornings to afternoons, so I trade all day unless I want do something else. I do find that less signals occur in the afternoon, but they are no better or worse than same signals in the morning.
Yes... my decision was based on extensive back testing of both hypothetical results and more importantly,, my actual trades... win ratio goes up alot, trade expectancy per trade goes 4X,,, it is all good, and I hope less stress.
Every minute of every day, whether trading or not. Best advice I can think of is when you reach your profit goal, make sure you are flat, turn everything off and get out of the house, enjoy your victory. Tomorrow is another day.
That would be the next step for me.... turn off the screens,,, but I am still in my office and just cannot help but look,,,, I am thinking this is like playing chicken to cross a freeway... let's say the goal is to get to the other side of the 4 lanes safely. Doesn't it make more sense to stick myself in the lanes once or twice per day,,,vs. trying many more times and even trying to get back to the starting point. Each time I put on a trade I am at risk, so maybe my mentality is to be at risk the least amount of times that still gets me to my goal.
Oh how I want to get to that point. I have a "regular " job as well, so I am in my office. Sounds simple enough to close it off. At least I have learned to shut down my trading software that executes trades and just have a chart up, that forces me to think before I restart the software and be tempted to do a trade. It is amazing how little I now trade compared to when I started out. I was a maniac, I would never have thought to stop trading when the cash market is open. Or hell, stop at all.... I probably averaged over 12 trades per day, sometimes over 20. Now, I get weird if it is more than 2 trades a day.