First off, I can't thank you all enough for the support! It's absolutely insane to see all the replies and love, 8+ pages of it. I have read every single reply and taken perspective and wisdom from each one of them. It would take a long time to go through and respond to each and every person, just know I did read every reply.

I had a solid night of sleep and spent the day with my family. I have finally came down from the emotional state some, enough to think straight.

One question I am seeing a lot is about my strategy. I don't think it failed me. I failed myself. I ran most of the cash up from scalping options (TSLA and SPY usually 0-3DTE), and scalping securities (AAPL mostly, and then whatever else was having lots of volume/gapping on the day). I switched to futures for a bit here at the end before the blowup, and was having good success there (ES and RTY), and I feel like futures are perfect for me. For some reason I just decided to go back to what I was used to for a bit, probably out of habit and it's where a majority of my success was from. My strategy seems to work even better on futures, so I think I will be trading them exclusively when I get back on the horse Monday. My strategy is actually super simple, regardless if its options, shares, futures, etc. I trade support and resistance levels and I trade with the trend always. I don't trade breakouts or pure momentum or anything. I prefer a drop or breakout to happen, then wait as new floors and ceilings are formed, and I take those trades instead. I like trading inside channels of consolidation that have a wide range, the wider the better. Example, once I see a ceiling being retested, and if the trend is down, I will short once it retests that ceiling expecting it to fail because the major trend is down. Take my profit at the floor, leave a runner incase it breaks a floor. The stop loss is some what tight with minimal risk, because if it breaks out it did the opposite of what I wanted and the stop loss is set far enough out so it can breathe upon a fake out, but will stop out if it runs hard. Same for going long. I buy in at a clear floor, and take my profits at the ceiling, usually leaving a runner if it does breakout of the channel. I don't use any indicators at all, and instead just identify highs and lows and support/resistance levels myself. Its insane when you draw these yourself how much the market will follow these trends to the exact tick sometimes. I very rarely short if the trend is overall up, and I very rarely go long if the trend is down. Indicators made me lose money most of the time (not as much as my emotional trading though heh ). Not sure if its because I was too focused on them or what, but I quickly realized I was doing way way way better without them.

My biggest day ever was around 15k, a TSLA scalp turned into an all day hold as it just kept running. My biggest loss in a day before the blowup was like 3.5k, and I felt sick to my stomach for days. My account was only like 35kish at that time probably. I made it back quick enough though. One thing I noticed was as my account just kept getting larger, those losses I was getting sick over began to feel like nothing. I wish I still got sick to my stomach over those losses and realized the severity of what it was leading to. I think I normalized these large losses in a way because I felt justified by the large balance I ran up. It was pure cockiness. When I was raging I didn't follow my plan at all obviously. Not in any sense at all. I was over trading, and I even added to losing positions, something I never do and is in my checklists to never do ever. I should've knew right then and there when I broke that rule to stop, but I knew while I was doing it I needed to stop. I just can't believe how out of hand it got and how the spiral blew up my account so quickly. It makes me realize how dangerous emotion is. I was in trades with my heart pumping, my blood rushing and rage in my body. A sim can never recreate this situation for me because the emotion I experienced wouldn't have happened. No panic or revenge trading because I would've simply edited the account balance if I ran out. Emotion can't be represented in a sim, and it's directly what led to my demise. Sim is great for testing strategies and such I think, but I don't know that it will help my situation a whole lot (unless my strategy clearly falls apart entirely).

My major takeaways for now:

1. Set a loss limit on my account. This will straight up prevent me from blowing up, even if I get extremely emotional again.
2. Take half of my profits at the end of the day. I will begin doing this once I get my account back to around 30k.
3. Work on controlling my emotions better, even though #1 helps massively with this and lets me be human still.


I wish I would have followed #2 earlier and blew 30k instead of 60k. But I am taking this as a massive learning experience. I need to get back in the mindset of where I was at 10k. My mindset then was 1% a day, and it got me to where I was. I know some replies here are saying it's unachievable, but honestly with small account sizes (under ~1mil), I really think it's not that far fetched. Hell I was doing it, so I know it's not crazy talk. Yes my style technically involves using leverage (not using margin, but options is technically leverage), but I don't feel that leverage is what killed me at all. Me being extremely emotional and not sticking super tight to the plan is what killed me. I won't give up leverage because it's apart of my style, and how I got anywhere in the first place. So while leverage led to my demise in a certain sense, it's not the thing I feel blew up the account.

Thanks again for all the replies and support everyone. Monday I will saddle back up and post a journal thread and document my journey of rebuilding. I'll either blow up (again) or glow up (again). I'll try to post everyday. I will be trading strictly futures, as I only have good vibes and experiences with them, plus it'll be a fun new adventure too.

Excellent post. Raw and real. What do you learn from this? Where do you go from here? That's entirely up to you. I've been there and view it all as part of the learning process. It sounds like you have some solid skills and you like/love to trade and have the necessary commitment. There is always going to be something new, an unusual array of unique circumstances that will come along that will test you. It's the nature of the game. If something negative happens to me I fall back, analyze what went wrong. Take a break. Maybe sim trade a bit on great high quality live data platform until I'm optimized, confident, and then ease back in. Imagine yourself say Tiger Woods growing up...how many years did he spend learning the game, honing his craft. How many practice swings, how many games played? How many failures, bad choices, revenge playing as well as successes? Even if you have a great run, great edges or strat's there is going to be a randomness to the distribution of wins/losses within the edge. Really getting that at my core helped me to avoid revenge trading. There are lessons we must learn along the way and better early than later. Sometimes one has to go through them many times but hopefully one begins to recognize what's happening early, change course or avoid them re-occurring. With like 1200 human cognitive bias's that all seem to conspire to make trading difficult it's not any surprise the mental aspect is difficult. The other thing that really helped me as well was really getting the following: "some things work, some of the time". When the conditions are right and my approach is working I go in heavier, when its not I'm in light or out and waiting. Anyway good luck in the future. The mental game is a big part of trading.

As a trader you give up control but not action and consequence of action. "Revenge" trading is a way of trying to be in control. This environment is the hardest, next to a battlefield, we will even have to face. It wears us down and occasionally we snap. On the battlefield, you die. Here the price is the death of your account and spirit.

Behavior limiters is the only way you will make it long range.

That's a rough ride. I know that exact feeling you described. your post resonated with me a lot. I've had many days in my trading career like that, where I can't believe my stupidity. Slept through an alarm once cause I had a girl over and lost $50k on a trade I was set to make $100k on if I woke up on time. Just one example. First thing to remember is you can always make it back. There is always opportunity in the market. Read reminiscences of a stock operator. He went bankrupt multiple times, but was undoubtedly one of the greatest traders ever. Read market wizards, there are plenty such stories of people losing it all and starting again from scratch. The most important thing is to take the lesson, don't pay the tuition and not get the lesson. Don't be greedy. Don't trade your emotions. Have emotional/monetary stops. If you drop 10% of your account, or whatever number, take a break from trading, reflect on your emotional state and what you are doing wrong. Never revenge trade.

Don't let this experience discourage you. Every great trade has been through it. What matters is how you deal with this now.

fxzen 

I just wanted to second this book. I've read all the popular psychology books, some many times over, and watched tons of videos from ones like Steenbarger et al, and this book blows them all away. It's not just a book about theory but gives you practical tools to build an system to improve your mental and emotional game. Knowing why your emotional mind takes over doesn't prevent it from happening - you need to develop the emotional skills to identify the signals before it takes over and renders your logical mind useless, and this book can help you do that. You need to do the deep work, this isn't a quick fix, but can give you the understanding, the tools and a plan to get there.

Found out about Jared a while back and he is the best. He's a big time poker and golf coach. Best thing about him is that he knows little about trading so you're not going to here this cut your losses and let your profits run kind of nonsense

Well, here are my 2c since I can relate to you. (I'm sure most people here can)

1. Tell your spouse. Its important, lot more than it might seem to you.

2. Remove 7k from your trading account and use only 3k for now.

3. You seem to have some form of edge with you, your past success is proof of it. But there is likely problem of scaling in or out, I would suggest running backtests and walk forward tests with your current strategy with different position management strategies. This site has lot of resources for that.

4. I would also suggest to keep a detailed record or journal of some sort, its helpful in long run, it automatically improves you whenever you look back at your own trades. (What I was doing just couple of months ago seems silly to me, that's how much change it can cause)

5. Take this year as a learning experience and rejoice that you are in net profit and not a car or home down. I'm not kidding, that's where most end up.

6. Nothing wrong in taking some time off either, forum advice usually doesn't help if you don't have clear head yourself.

The issue that i don't think most retail traders realize is that the same things that caused you to blow up were probably how you made the gains. You don't get those kinds of crazy gains without taking some crazy risks in the first place. It's rarely ever just a one time loss of control. Instead you'll almost always see excessive risk taking every step of the way, and it's just a matter of time before you get caught.

One thing I would add here (and I haven’t read all the posts on here so am not sure if I’m repeating anyone) is that learning how to program even at a basic level can help to avoid emotional trading. I did the same thing as you when starting out discretionary trading and lost a lot more money. Started off with around 440k after a year or more of research/paper trading, made 60k in around 2 weeks in late 2017 and then gave it all back and more. About 18 mos later I was down to 100k after some awful trades on gold futures and selling options on a few other contracts. Some of this was just poor trading but most of it was trading on emotion etc. It’s really hard to get away from this when your trading manually (or discretionary) as you have to make so many decisions. You can’t avoid emotional bias in any decision making no matter what people say. You’re human like everyone else. Since I learned to code last year (Tradestation easylanguage - nothing too crazy), it’s been a dramatic improvement. No more emotion. I just let the algo do it’s thing and don’t think about it. I have a “system stop loss” in place in case there is a large drawdown but luckily haven’t got close to that yet. All in all, a much better approach IMO and is the only (almost) fool proof way to keep emotions out of it. Once you’ve got a decent strategy (and it sounds like you do) put the extra effort in to learn some basic coding. You won’t regret it...

Hey blew,
I know right where you are because I've been there.
On Monday August 24th 2015 I increased my account by a little over 2000%
in what I refer to as the greatest 5 1/2 hours of my life.

My days off were the 20th (Thu) & 21st (Fri) and I was looking forward to trading.
Somebody called in sick, so I had to work. When I saw what the market did (huge down days)
I was not happy. The following Monday I was given a day off and it was a bigger day than Thu & Fri
combined. I made a ton on the short side, a LOT of $$$.

It was all gone within a month and a half or so. I thought I had everything all figured out.
My Uncle wrote me out of his will because he was scared I'd screw away my inheritance on day trading.
My Father cried and I felt just like you do now. But those wounds heal, in time.

As many have mentioned, you clearly have something real. To do what you did over those months of
profitability is much more than one day of dumb luck (like I had).

I have two pieces of advice for you:

1) Tell your Wife soon as possible. Waiting only makes it worse.

2) Take some time off from trading. It doesn't sound like your head is in any place to trade.
In a week or 6 months or whatever it is, start sim trading your plan. Get comfortable again
before going LIVE.

The sooner you can get your head back to normal, the better off you'll be. I don't know if your a
football fan or not but I've heard them say frequently that the best players have short memories.
A d-back that gets burned for a TD needs to forget it and cover his receiver the next play and the rest of the game.
A QB that throws a game crushing interception needs to forget it and play at the level that got him the job.
Learn what you can from this and turn it into a positive the best that you can. Going back to the football analogy,
put it behind you and move forward. That knot of barbed wire in your gut WILL go away.

I know it doesn't feel like it now but you'll survive this and come out the other side a better trader.
Best wishes, JM

That_Day

blew 

So I just need to get this off my chest. I just gave away all my gains on the year. I went from 7k -> 70k -> 10k. I blew most of it revenge trading and taking too big of position sizes. I got so comfortable scaling up as I was profiting consistently, and I threw it all away in like 10-15 trades. All the work I put in.. day and night studying all the styles of trading, figuring out what worked for me and what didn’t, and I blew it all within a few days by emotionally revenge trading and scaling up higher as the losses got deeper. How could I be so stupid?! I’m still in disbelief I blew an account. I was happy to be one of the ones who didn’t blow up an account because I remained disciplined enough to run up basically 1000% in 5 months. I can’t bring myself to tell my spouse. She would be really supportive I know it, but I can’t even face myself at the moment, let alone have to explain what happened. Disgusted with myself. Utterly disgusted. I can’t believe I let myself get so emotional and out of control. What in the fuck was going through this dense skull of mine?! My confidence is shaken but it’s not at the same time. I’m confident that I just made 1000% in 5 months, and I’m also confident I just blew that 1000% in 3 days. So what does that really say about me as a trader... that I’m probably not too good I’m thinking. The problem is trading is now apart of my identity it feels like. I love it but right now I hate it. Before a 4K swing up or down was no big deal, cause I’m some big shot or some shit I guess. But now 4K would axe me for good damn near. I want to give up but I don’t cause I love trading. What can I learn from this? Don’t revenge trade. But I knew that. I knew it while I was doing it and I know it now. So why didn’t I fucking stop?? I don’t know what to do from here.

Only awakening you need is here -
- WHEN were you planning to withdraw your profits ?
- If you didn't plan for it, Why are you trading without a goal for withdrawals ?
- Why are you trading at all ?
- Take profits OUT after it reaches 2X, 3X or 4X your accounts size. Save 1X as your seed account for every 2X or 3X withdrawals. Coz Bullshit happens.

Don't sweat what happened. Get going again. Cheers