Hi There,
I had a bit of a personal melt down last week. I have far too many hobbies/jobs which I have trouble justifying when they won't make me wealthy. It boils down to wanting simplicity in my life. It is hard to explain but at times I just want to run off somewhere, get a part-time job, rent a room, and devote all my free time to trading/study/building etc. I don't have kids but I do have wonderful parents that need me, and if I have to honest, I need them. This depression passed(as it always does) and I have returned to watching the world turn. My trading has improved, I think. I am doing better but is it just luck? I still trade very small but that is what is needed as I work on honing my futures trading. My confidence is back and thats all that matters. I have thrown away those murky long term trades for scalps which focus on short moves. Now back to the good problems to have. How to increase profits and how to stay productive. Thanks for listening.

P&L (SIM)-Commissions included(1$ per micro round trip)
1. RotationalSim(only sim account now)=+72.75 with 5 trades (TOTAL=4222.50)

hI @FrankFrankie

You're definitely not alone. These feelings are fairly common, especially at the beginning of one's trading journey.


In case you haven't done so, I would highly recommend to check the Trading Psychology section of this site.

Hi There,
I am excited to trade this week and am wondering if others have to go through the same fog that I do every sunday night or monday morning. I have an entire process to "get in the groove" and become synced with markets. I have a few quotes like "Only the fool bends the tool" and "Passing on a bad trade is a good trade" to push me into the proper mental state that I need to trade. I also push myself to talk out loud and debate with myself as the day progresses and conditions change. I am genuinely curious what others do to pump themselves up. I am still not fully "in the groove" as I write this and often have to wait until tuesday for the fog to clear. I spend a good amount of time on the weekends doing trading adjacent things but do not look at current charts. I should. I don't have any good trades to share this week but I do have a missed trade that I recorded. Early last week I had a big loser and then spent the rest of the week recovering from it. Was mostly successful. My other investments have been mostly flat for months and I have a ton of anxiety about spending time on that. Perhaps my mistake with my investments is that II tweak them too much rather than just let it work. I did a full performance review of my automated long term strategy on friday and am kicking myself for not trusting it enough. If I would have just committed the majority of the funds to it and not tried to do other things, I would be very happy right now. This automated strategy is the only thing keeping me in the green at all in my investments. And even now, after seeing the proof that it works with a backtest, works in reality, I am still weary of just letting it rule. I am fearful that the moment I do that, market conditions will change radically. What if this happens... What if I had only done that... What if my ass fell off? Thanks for listening

P&L (SIM)-Commissions included(1$ per micro round trip)
1. RotationalSim(only sim account now)=-27 with 5 trades (TOTAL=4195.5)


The following is a trade that I missed but shows a nice set up the deserves to be seen. Wednesday July 8th 2026
-Price opened and immediately formed a range just above the open. Several signs started to emerge that buyers were losing control. Those signs being:
1.) Several long wicks pointing upwards showing auction preference for lower prices.
2.) Failure for any candles to make new highs after 0920
3.) General downward slant of candles.
4.) Most price action below POC and POC eventually migrating lower.
*Im sure others will see more
The perfect trade here would have been grabbing a single contract every time price failed to break VAH. This is sorta unrealistic so the more ideal trade would have been to go short after price pulled back to initial balance low around 10:40.


ESU26[MESU26 [CBV][M] 5 Min #1 2026-07-08 10~47~16.228

Hi There,
When this site was down for two weeks, I decided to move my journal to elitetrader.com. I have decided to try and post it to both places but forgive me if I choose only one if it becomes a giant pain.

Hi There,
I have not posted for some time as I waited for NexusFi to return. Things have been okay. I have been working hard on a small-cap strategy for my investments as well as a custom LLM for SierraCharts. That has been fun and I think the first time that using an LLM has not ended with extreme frustration. I made everything local because I do believe that prices will continue to rise for the cloud based chat bots. For those interested in the technicals, I set up VS Codium with Continue.dev along with a MCP/RAG type server to use my local Qwen3 coder. Sierra Charts provides a download of their documentation and I used that along with code examples to create this "agent". This may sound very advanced but I assure you I am still a level 1 techie when it comes to this stuff and was just following basic tutorials. I also have yet to use it for any big projects and only tested it on smaller stuff. Sometimes I think I do all this extra shit to avoid taking any real risk with trading. As my problem continues to be holding on to winners, I find comfort in building the tools I may or may not use. These past two weeks my win rate has been 80% and traditionally I keep a win rate above 70%(when I control my "hail mary" tendencies). But my average winning trade over the past two weeks was 5$. It is obvious to see that I feel more comfortable keeping my win rate high and my R/R in the shitter. The little voice in my head says that I was only playing around last week because of FOMC and major earnings but that little voice always comes up with something. A kind soul recommended some books on stoicism and I will be giving those a read but perhaps as with all problems in life, the only answer is time and pain. Thanks for listening and thank you to all the kind suggestions.

I will be reporting my winnings from just last week below. From now on I will try to post this journal over the weekend or by monday but blah blah blah. As I might have stated earlier, once I reach a total balance of 5k, I will be returning to cash. Lets hope I can learn to hold on to winners by then or I will never make more money with money.

P&L (SIM)-Commissions included(1$ per micro round trip) July 26 to Aug 1
Win rate of 75%
1. SimAccount=+29.50 with 8 trades (TOTAL=4341)

Hi There
Trading last week was not very eventful for me last week. I had to take two days off for personal reasons and that always messes things up. I had one great trade which I saved for explanation below. I used to stress so much about taking early profits and failing to capture larger moves but I have come to realize that this is the kind of trader I am. Perhaps longer term trades will become part of a future strategy but for now I will embrace the short term scalp mentality. I don't need to 10x my profit targets, just 1.5 to 2x is fine and repeatable. And I can also increase the amount of contracts, slowly. Frequency could also increase but slowly as I can get into trouble if I focus too much on charts. Until next week, thanks for listening.


P&L (SIM)-Commissions included(1$ per micro round trip) Aug 2 to Aug 7

Win rate of 80%

1. SimAccount=+23.75 with 10 trades (TOTAL=4364.75)



Example Trade-Aug 5th @20:28 EST
1-Price was returning to the open and value area low, 2 major support areas

2-I follow Ask-Bid orders to gauge interest at major support/resistance areas and sellers did not seem aggressive enough to take it lower yet.
3-But since POC was pulled down I only held until price reached POC
4-I entered with 2 contracts and took off the first one 1/3 profit target.
5-Of note is the fact that I did not move any of my profit targets and everything worked out as planned
ESU26[MESU26 [CBV][M] 5 Min #1 2026-08-10 07~43~58.781

FrankFrankie 

Thank you for the kind words

You're Welcome. Good Luck!

What you wrote about complexity not being the answer caught my attention.

I went through something very similar. I kept adding information, tools, and different ways of looking at the market because I thought the next piece might finally make things clearer.

Eventually I started wondering about something else:

What if the search for more clarity wasn’t really about the market? What if I was trying to make myself feel more certain before making a decision?

That question changed the way I started observing my own trading.

I’m not saying that’s what’s happening in your case. Your post just reminded me strongly of that period in my own journey.

I’ll be interested to see where this journal takes you. Thanks for sharing it.