you caught the drop,congratulation! I shorted it on the spike(I hate to short on the news) , I felt it will to 60 around. follow my hunch is great. Jessive livermore's least resistance of line works perfectly in this situation. Turkey's price is cut half today.
Great job again today taking real money. That's awesome and I am happy for you. Hopefully the last couple of days will give you that extra pep in your step that you need to get you where you want to be with trading. Keep up the good work!
If I may suggest one idea you should think about. It seems that you are down early in the day pretty often, that could be a big problem to overcome, your mental is down from the start. May be you are rushing too much to take a trade. Why don't you start with a high probability trade first. Take sometime off, come back and try to take only the best setups early in the day, don't rush. It is not easy, but it is possible with proper sleep and good mental. Good luck. Edit: See that you are doing the right thing lately, congrats, keep it up. FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real.
Trade Strategy Update: Considering the two day experiment of being forced to just hold a trade until it hit my stop loss or take profit, and the 30 day history of consistently cutting my winning trades short, I have decided that for the first week of December I am going trade with the following adjustments: Trades with exit targets 1) After entering a trade, I will allow two trade adjustments.... one to my take profit and one to my stop loss. After that I have to leave it alone. Those adjustments have to be decided before I enter the trade. 2) If the take profit gets within a 10% zone, I can close it out without violating the above rule. Example: If my take profit is 30 ticks, I can close it out once it hits 27 ticks or wait until 30 ticks. Reasoning behind this, is I have had too many times the market comes within 1 tick and I never get the fill... no reason to leave 27 ticks at risk. 3) The stop loss can never be adjusted to lock in profit, only to reduce risk. This may sound weird, but I want to get into the habit of holding trades longer and allow my trade assumption more time to work. I also want to get more comfortable with holding a winning trade with the potential of still losing ticks. Trades with trailing stops My methodology also has trades where you trail stops and just allow your winners to run. This can be very effective on days like Thursday and Friday when the market moves so much in one direction. Therefore: 1) I can only trail stops based on 5min (or higher) market structure, I can't close out a trade just because of profit or because I "think" the market is going to reverse. 2) This type of trade is pre-determined by my methodology, and I don't get to turn a trade with profit exit into a trailing stop trade or vice versa. There it is. A few simply changes, that should slow me down a bit and force me to just let the trade work while still sticking to my original trade methodology of taking trades with an edge. Of interest, read this weekend an article by Rande Howell..."The Illusion of Hard Work"... and I quote "Your demons have much to teach you if you are willing to face them. Stay oblivious to them and they will devour your capital. This is the missing piece - the head game of trading - where so many traders stay stuck. The markets do not care. You can stay stuck in self-limiting belief patterns for as long as your capital will allow you. Success can stay a mirage, or right around the corner - so close, yet so far. You can declare that it is not fair after all your hard work or that the gods of the market must be crazy. The markets only answer with silence. The only one that cares is you. And you can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The choice is always yours."
Day #19 - It was a restless night, as I had added to my crude short in my own account and had stops in protecting it, but didn't sleep that well, until I got up in the night and saw that I was stopped out. After that, slept fine. So holding that trade through the weekend worked well. I am now back to combine trading, so no trading in my live account... focus is on trading OPM and passing this combine. So Monday, I saw the market rally, but I had a serious bias... short... and matter of fact, I am still fighting with that bias. It literally felt painful to go long... and I had ample opportunity to get long... but I just couldn't seem to do it. Kept envisioning the market reversing. So yes, I was fighting in my head with what I was "making into my own reality" and the reality of what the market was shouting out. The second thing, I found myself much more picky about taking trades because I knew that I would have to hold them longer.... and this also forced me to think more about my profit target exits. Which isn't a bad thing, but I did find myself hesitating to take some great setups. I do remember being very concerned with keeping today a winning day. I wanted to put another winner up on the board, even if it was just a small winning day. This is fine, but I caught myself limiting my opportunities and not entering trades when it was the correct thing to do. All in all, a good day back into combine trading. Very glad I didn't fight the trend inside the account, all though mentally I did that for most of the day. So another to add to the list... need to work on having more equanimity. Wrapping up the day, I am still pretty hard on myself though. Rather than being pumped on having a winning day, I catch myself telling myself I should have gone long... at least once. What was I thinking, etc. Time to learn how to become my best friend in trading! +75
Today: Woke up with a headache, and yesterday evening had a needed discussion with the X about Christmas, our kids, etc. Followed up with some text messages later... just some stuff that needed to be said. However, I know in the past 30 days when I have had that conversation or texts I haven't performed well in the next trading day. And seeing how this is about elite performance, I asked myself this question: Should I be trading today? And the thoughts: 1) You have a headache 2) You got X'd last night 3) Market will be here tomorrow 4) Maybe you are suffering from FOMO Yesterday my psych coach had mentioned about it not being a good idea to trade if you have a high level of pain. I didn't think of my headache as being a high level of pain, but decided that with those two things this would be a good idea not to trade. I do need to learn when NOT to trade. So I just had a relaxing morning. I followed the market, was tempted a couple of times to put some trades on. Two would have worked fine, and one wouldn't have. In hindsight, I think today I was my best friend. Edit: I want to add, that mentally I now feel great about my decision, all though at the time I struggled with it. I feel very relaxed now. I feel like I protected my account. I feel like I did the "correct" thing, which was... no trading, sit the day out.