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Great day! I was away from my platform from about 12 to about 2:30. Still, I got 6 trades in with only 1 loss (because of a big mistake on my part)
6 trades
5 wins
1 loss
+3.25 points net
$138.26 profit including commissions
I was stoked to see I could perform well on the range day yesterday AND the dull grind higher today. I'm also proud that I followed my entry and exit rules perfectly, taking my 4-tick scalps and resisting the urge to try for a runner. Those will come later when I'm trading 2 contracts.
Total blowout today. I made the classic psychological mistake, entering a position without a stop. It started moving against me so fast that I just froze. I'm not sure what to do. If I switch to paper trading it won't be the same. It won't put me under the kind of stress that induces those kinds of psychological mistakes. But if I trade real money I might screw up again and take myself out of the game.
I've made this mistake before, many times in fact. I'm sure there are people here who have made the same mistake trading futures. How have you over come it? So far I've been unable to figure out how to avoid that mistake.
Anyway, here are my charts for the day:
I'm going to go spend some time in the psychology forum now.
I decided I'm going to paper trade for at least a week. Yes, it won't simulate the stress and pressure that induces the kind of psychological mistakes that I made yesterday. However, I won't lose a dime. I'll live to trade another day. And I'll improve my price action reading skills.
I'll still post charts, but they will show my paper trades of course.
I've made the same mistake. I get angry start moving my stops, adding contracts when price is moving against me. I finally just quit because I'm sick of loosing money. I've lost 2 small accounts, after each loss I've stopped trading live for about 6 months. After the last account I've moved to a paper account, where I can work on the problems I've faced. Lets face it, from your last experience it sounds like you have a discipline problem, thats a huge one for me too. This is where a sim account is great......if you can't exercise discipline in that kind of relaxed environment, you won't in real life either. I've been killing it in sim accounts for the last months, I've repeatedly taken $5000 balances to well over $30000 in a couple months time but I've done it by straying from rules that i'd have to adhere to in real life, so I'm still trading in a sim account. I recently decided that I'm going to enter the Topsteptrader combine, but not until I can pass it in a sim environment. I know I can but I get those days that throw my whole rhythm off because I've done something my rules wouldn't allow me. And that's one thing I need to do....take some time to write down my entire plan instead of trying to remember the rules as I go. I need more discipline. I need to take this more serious as well. I think those are a couple of things that a lot of retail traders lack which keeps them/me from becoming a successful trader. Good Luck.
Did much better today. I made some good reads and caught a few runners, too. I traded each entry with 2 contracts, looking to scalp 4 ticks on one contract and let the other run with a stop at b/e.
14 trades
11 wins
3 losses
+11.75 points net
+$481.66 profit including commissions
Here are my charts which I tried to capture "real time":
Uhg, rough day today. Again, I have the charts as they were captured "real-time" throughout the day. It seems like my entries were legit but very few of them worked today. Late in the day I finally realized that we were having a "spike and trend" day as Mack discussed recently ().
I'm so grateful that I'm only paper trading this. One important thing I learned today is that I need to zoom out on the chart every 15 min or so to see if there's an overall theme forming. I think I would have recognized the gentle up-trend today after the 3rd bounce and would have been looking for more long entries.