FrankFrankie 

What you said, "trying to make myself feel more certain before making a decision" describes it perfectly. I have come to find I am the type of trader that wants to put probability on my sidd

Hi @FrankFrankie

I don't believe there's anything inherently wrong about being "more certain", i.e. wanting to put probability on your side, as long as you don't want to put absolute certainty on your side, which would not be appropriate for one of the most risky endeavors in the world. I hope it makes sense.

About confidence, I struggled too with it years ago.

Because I am an analytical person, I decided the way to boost my confidence was to dissect, segment and track my trades, and confidence hasn't been a problem since.

I described that approach in this thread:

The rabbit hole and the process I'd like to start a thread so that I have a place to collect material and share thoughts about the trading process. I'm not going to write too frequently or extensively - I don't want this thread to absorb too much time from trading and …

Trade analysis may or may not be something for you to consider, it all depends on how your mind works (by that I mean everyone is different and no approach will work for everyone), but if it is helpful, I am happy to expand should you have any questions.

Hi There
I don't have much to say about last week. My small cap strategy has not had the right market since the beginning of August. It seems like the market as a whole is gearing up for a terrible September and October. This is what I wanted since the start of this year and I cannot even remember why any more. Something about being sick of seeing the government printing money. I am willing to bet that if I had been running my small cap strategy successfully earlier this year, I would give two shits about printing money. I must admit that I was upset only because I failed to make any substantial money from it. So what now. I am trying all sorts of different combinations with stocks until I find my sweet spot. I still have tremendous faith in my small cap strategy but the markets are not aligned for a long only strategy at the moment. And of course I will continue with trying to day trade the ES. Thanks for listening.


P&L (SIM)-Commissions included(1$ per micro round trip) Sep 6 to sep 12

Win rate of 100%

1. SimAccount=+75.25 with 4 trades (TOTAL=4483)
-I have not done terribly. I just have a hard time thinking this win streak is nothing but luck. And my goal was 5000 before moving back to cash. IT will take me another year at this rate. Perhaps ill just move to cash now and have faith in my battle scars.

Hi There,
Feeling terrible this morning for no good reason. I cannot seem to make my brain work and I am just going through the motions. These things tend to happen and it almost always ends in me working like a madman for the next couple months. It conjures up the mentality of, "I may not be as good as everyone else, but at least I can out work them". But is it "real work"? My brother always makes snide little comments about it being fake work, and I will love the day when I make more than him so I can spend the rest of my life rubbing it in his face. This is terrible. I've got every demon floating in my head and it is giving me a headache and making me be mean for no reason. I am not a cruel person, all I want is a chance but the problem is that nobody is entitled to anything. Well I wouldn't call that a problem, just reality.
I find it hard to believe this recent recovery in the markets but I will follow the charts and shut up. I have been working on another stock trading strategy for the past 3 weeks. It follows the best performing industries and then filters from there. My first intention was for a day trading method where I just buy on open and sell on close but I have found that swing trading them until the industry starts lagging might be best. The buy on open thing has potential too but will require much more careful evaluation. I am only collecting data now as I determine the exclusionary characteristics I need to narrow the selection. And for once I am not trying to create mountains of work for the fun of it. There are no unfinished projects, if they have merit then they will be done. The rest can go to the scrap heap.

P&L (SIM)-Commissions included(1$ per micro round trip) Sep 13 to sep 18

I barely traded with FOMC and other stuff. Smart call I guess...

1. SimAccount=+8.25 with 1 trades (TOTAL=4491.25)

Hi There
I am late for my weekly journal. I just put it off because I did not want to talk about this. Anyway, I am now switching to cash again for my futures trading account. Sometimes I dont risk enough. I spend far too much time making sure that something is profitable or not too risky when this entire profession is about taking risks. Unlike many traders, I don't gamble and have never been into gambling. I see what a hardcore addiction can do to people and I just don't get it. I have never looked at trading as a gamble and I don't get excited by winning. I get excited by beating the game. Maybe this is a slight disadvantage for me because I don't feel the raw emotions of it all. i just continue to evaluate and try another strategy. I am not sure where I am going with this but I am done with paper trading for futures. It can only take me so far and I need to quit playing around.

I would like to discuss the macro situation. I cannot help but feel like God is taking a giant crap on my head. For the past 18 months I have watched this market rocket again and again. It has been relentless and I have had the hardest time beating it into my own head that logic does not matter for markets. Every powerful entity in the world has been behind this bubble and I still thought that I better stay out of it instead of partaking. How wise I have been. So I finally capitulated and developed several swing strategies only to have the entire market move towards risk-off. I mean within days of starting these strategies the entire landscape changed and now I have benched them and am scrambling to find out where to make money now. I am mostly upset with myself for sitting on the sidelines for so long and just waiting for the bubble to pop. i understand that things could change overnight but I cannot help but think that the largest party in the history of the markets is ending and I just went and bought my party hat yesterday. Enough shame and pity, I learned some very valuable lessons and am now ready for anything that could happen. I am already trying to find out what will work if we continue to move towards a risk-off environment. I am working with a self-directed IRA account for my larger investments so I cannot short and that is a good thing. I cannot time this type of short. Heck some of the smartest traders are broke now because they thought they could time a bear market. Alright enough of this. My time will now be focused on two areas.

1. My cash futures account which I will scalp only an update here every week(see below)
2. My IRA which is split into two sections.
1. My long term automated strategy(the only successful strategy I ever built but it is SLOW)
2. Attempting to build an exponential swing strategy.

Cash Account P&L-Sep 20-26(I include commissions which are 1.02$ round trip)
-14.41 with 5 trades(3786.92)

Hi There,
I must force myself to come here and write an update because I have very little to say and am just waiting to say something good for once. I have been running screens and recording prices non stop and always come back to "not enough data". The basic gist of my in-progress strategies is this. They are all long only. I screen for recent bullish performance with many different Indices and methods, then once I get a list I check the index to make sure the market regime is in support of a long play. Then I record the results and update it every day. I then make adjustments and branch out different methods into their own new strategy. But they are all very similar in that they are following momentum, following strength. I have about five of them now in all different markets because I do not want to wait for small caps to recover. The second one of them give birth to something fruitful, I will share it here. And I continue my futures account with no wins. I still have hope there but it is hard to commit time to just watching charts.

Cash Account P&L-Sep 20-26(I include commissions which are 1.02$ round trip)
-8.35 with 27! trades(3778.57)

I tried but ended up breaking even. I fear too much losing this money. There is maybe too much stress attached to it

FrankFrankie 

Hi there. ---I have recently become slightly profitable after many years of hard work. Like many traders, I lost a few small accounts in the beginning. Gave "prop" trading a very short try. Some time ago I took a huge step and started treating this as my full time job. I live in a shack, with a dirt floor and a super computer in the corner. I started managing my current account about 2 years ago. I lost about 20k as quickly as I could. It has taken until now but I am currently up ~20k with better than bad risk management. I now have a problem with increasing my profits. Some may call this a good problem to have and they are correct. Here I will attempt to log my journey as I become active in this community again. -About my current trading I use half of my money for longer term swing type trading. And that longer term section is split into several groups. Some is automated, others are hedges. Right now this section is the majority of my profits. But this section is not why I am here today. I do have plans to work on this eventually but I would like to focus on my futures trading The other half is futures trading where I mostly scalp MES, MNQ, M2K, MYM, MGC, and MCL. By scalp I mean trades that are mostly less than 1 minute long. I am not against longer term futures trades I just don't have a valid strategy right now. This is the section of my trading that I want to improve the most. I have a great win rate and I can see much promise in scalping. The problem is that I don't really know where to start in order to increase my profits. Below I go into my latest efforts in this further. -Below will be my first post and I will try to post as often as I can. My first attempt to increase my scalping profits did not work out at all. It would help to describe my current strategy for scalping. I use a 5min candlestick chart. On this chart I plot key areas such as Previous day's OHLC, Previous month's OHLC, ORB, and S/R zones. I also use RSI and a volume indicator that breaks up buyers and sellers on the horizontal. Over a long time I have become very good at understanding price action. I wait for price to reach a key area and profit from the short move that often happens unless price action shows a sweep coming. On pull backs I might extend my profit a bit more but mostly I take 3-20 points on the MNQ. I dont worry about how far or how long price might break away from a key area. I just take the initial move. That is the best thing about scalping. This was working great but I wanted to make more. I had little room to increase the amount of contracts due to margin. I could have watched the markets for 24 hours to get every move but that has limits also. And here is where I went wrong. i thought that if I learned something new and used different charts, that I would just be able to trade more and increase my frequency of trades. I spent a lot of time learning about footprint charts and volume profile with the idea that I would somehow get a clearer view than what I already had. Those are great tools but adding more stuff is never the answer. I am now feeling uncomfortable when I load my charts. I have taken my stress level to the moon and now I feel like shitting down everything, plotting my own charts and picking stocks form the paper. I now sit with the realization that complexity was not the answer. I now will clean up my charts to what I had before adn just tradde until I gain back the little bit I lost. But my problem remains. How to increase profits in day trading? I will now start the project and journal it here. One thing has become clear. Without discussion, I tend to become fixated on the wrong things. I will share what trades I take from here on out adn what mistakes I made or lessons I learned. Eventually, I will work on the million other things I have planned to do. I don't know why it took so long to start a real journal but here I am now. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for sharing this. Going back to a clean chart is a good call. More tools often add noise, not edge.

One idea for your journal: change only one thing at a time. Then you can see what really made the difference.

One question: since your trades are under 1 minute, do you use a daily loss limit or a max number of trades per day? I知 curious how you handle a losing streak while scalping.

Good luck with the journal. I値l follow along.

Reasonwms 

Thanks for sharing this. Going back to a clean chart is a good call. More tools often add noise, not edge. One idea for your journal: change only one thing at a time. Then you can see what really made the difference. One question: since your trades are under 1 minute, do you use a daily loss limit or a max number of trades per day? I知 curious how you handle a losing streak while scalping. Good luck with the journal. I値l follow along.

I do have a daily loss limit. Right now it is about 2% because my account is smaller but I may drop it to 1% soon because I am in a losing streak. I am not sure where my edge was but it is gone now or I am just in a long losing streak. Thanks for the reminder that more tools may not always help. It is a maxim that needs reinforcement.

Hi There
I am embarrassed to share my progress with futures trading. Is it a coincidence that as soon as I switch back to cash from a paper account that I begin to fail constantly. The crazy insane thought does sometimes cross my mind that my broker has set up an AI gremlin that makes sure to hit my stop spot on before recovering. I know, the answer in my head is always a systematic solution. Widen your stops, or wait for confirmation. Figure out the thing that you need to know to find out how to know which way price will go. The limited success I've had with trading came from rigorous layering and testing to circumvent the discretionary problem. I am so stubborn to try and find a way to trade in real time intraday when all along my only edge may be building multi layered strategies that shave a little here and there. So why not apply this same logic to futures markets? Why not?

This past week I have mostly been building a quicker way to fill in spreadsheets with all the stock market data I have been collecting. I will not try and make it sound complicated because it is not. I now run about 5-6 scans before open every morning and record the tickers, settings, etcetera. I then use a script written by AI to fetch price data from yahoo finance data and import it into the spreadsheets. I then look for patterns with which settings produced consistently strong candidates, and determine characteristics of those strong winners with a mind to filter even more. It is a layering of scan, review, select, eliminate, and then execution. I have the goal of making execution systematic to be rid of any biases I may have for a particular sector or hype group. This entire process can easily get lost in endless data collection. So many times I hit a roadblock of needing more data so I am doing everything I can to assume and predict in the interest of actually getting something done for once. I can continue to collect data and adapt as needed while also trading with real money(albeit small amounts). Time is always limited and in the respect, thanks for listening. I would be interested to hear if any others have a similar approach. As soon as I start to keep detailed records I will share this progress as well.

Cash Account P&L-OCT 4-10(I include commissions which are 1.02$ round trip)
-75.17 with 14 trades(3703.40)