Thanks for the mention! The thought here is to get away from worrying about PNL and more about trading well. One of the reasons traders tend to get scared or completely psyche themselves out is by checking their PNL all day. My opinion is to not track it at all really. Every trader that focuses on making money in the market vs. trading the best of what the market was willing to provide will always have that psychological headwind. If you were to ask me how much money I made today trading, I wouldn't know off the top of my head. All I want to know is I focused on taking my predetermined entries and adapted to the day's developing context and order flow and went from there. Sure, I could pull up my trading platform and tell you but the point here is to not worry about it. By focusing on trading well, the money takes care of itself. At the end of the week, I simply remove/pay myself any excess capital in my trading account (I look to keep a static amount in my account) at the end of the week/month.
So, obviously risk management is key regardless of watching PNL. Knowing when you aren't seeing the market correctly, you just need to walk away and come back another day. I have a personal rule of simply shutting it down if I have three losing trades in a row. To me, that tells me I'm seeing the market completely wrong and need to stop and come back fresh. I then just close down my order entry platform and go do something completely opposite of trading to take my mind off of it. Once the market has closed and I'm feeling refreshed mentally, I'll sit back down and look over my charts to analyze what I was missing. It's the only way to truly learn without causing damage to your account as well as your psychological account.
So, to monitor my trading performance, I use a benchmark to measure against. When I managed money, I didn't stop after every trading day to see how much money I made or lost, it was more of a structured process of tracking my performance against specific benchmarks. So, I look to continue with this thought with my personal trading by simply tracking the points gained each day against what the daily range was. I do this at the end of each week to avoid feelings of defeat or euphoria. Trading is a very psychological endeavor and you need to maintain strong mental composure.
So, when reviewing my trading, I want to see what percentage of the market's range I was able to capture for each day as well as for the week, month and quarter. As an intra-day trader, there really is no other way of using a benchmark. I stated 50% as a good goal to get to but to start out, 20% - 30% of the week's range would be a good starting point goal. The last thing you want to do is think you need to trade like a madman with the thought of capturing the day's entire range. Focus on trading well first and foremost. The results will come from there.