Time to put my thoughts down on (internet) paper and have a place to put daily thoughts.
Firstly I'll go through my current goals, then a brief summary of my trading career, then I'll give a basic overview of my strategy.
Goals:
Be more aware of my mental state throughout the trading day.
Dive into the stats on the trades I take to get a clearer view of which strategies work best and when.
Trading Career:
I picked up trading just about when Covid hit. I managed restaurants for the prior years and used Covid as my way to get out and stay out of the business. I tried learning a number of different things but the only one I really loved was trading (sorry coding). I spent just under 2 years spending all my time learning everything I could on technical analysis. At a certain point I realized that there's so many different strategies out there and many of them aren't better or worse than others...it's just all up to the pilot. Over the past year I've been focused almost exclusively on psychology and monitoring my mental mistakes, since that was my biggest issue before I started to make money earlier this year. I'm very happy with the speed of my progress, but there's always going to be endless room to improve. The goals listed above are just a couple of the things I'm focused on mainly at the moment.
Trading Strategy Basics:
I scalp NQ Futures on small timeframes using a number of different indicators and strategies, but they almost always focus around price bouncing off of something, whether it's an EMA, previous support, or an AVWAP Standard Deviation. I also love utilizing RSI to note divergences, mostly to confirm bias unless the divergence is extreme.
Here is my NT8 setup and what I look at every day:
Day 1:
Made roughly $2,500 after commission today which is a solid day for me. I don't like having a dollar amount goal as I'd rather focus on the process and not worry about my PnL. I had one moment early in the day where I took a "revenge trade", jumping into a subpar setup right after a loss. I know I'm improving because I realized it right away and sold out at roughly even. My biggest loss of the day was one I was okay with and knew the risk was set pretty high. After that though today was one of those days that just felt smooth and easy (love these days). Some days feel like I'm fighting hard all day just to make and keep a few hundred bucks and then some days it feels almost too easy making a few thousand, but I'll take them whenever they come along.
I'd like to go more in depth on some strategy stuff when I have the time, but I think this journal could be a great way to learn.