Fade 

November 12, 2023 So, I guess a goal for now and possibly indefinitely, is to become humbler, care less about what people think in the self-worth sense, care more about what people think in the learning-about-myself sense, changing what needs to be changed about myself, and working on getting that cycle of adaptation up to plaid speeds.

When I was much younger I was really concerned about what people thought about me.

As I grew older I got to the point where I didn't really care about what people were thinking about me.

Now I realize that people were thinking about themselves and weren't thinking about me at all!!

deaddog 

When I was much younger I was really concerned about what people thought about me. As I grew older I got to the point where I didn't really care about what people were thinking about me. Now I realize that people were thinking about themselves and weren't thinking about me at all!!

Sage perspective. I'll try to remember that when I feel overly self-conscious. I'm still a young'n by most standards but I'm getting old enough to where I have a hard time keeping up with new slang. My nephew asked me what "yeet" meant a while back, and I had (and still have) no idea!

November 14th, 2023

Watched MES for a while this morning. Identified some triangles on the 1-minute chart but didn't trade them because I don't have rules for them. Just watched to see how things played out. Getting better at reading charts. Beginning to have a better grasp on the moment-to-moment price action.





Still new with triangles. I'm not sure about the tiny one in the picture. I was trying to keep an eye on volume while the patterns were forming too.


Profit Targets:

Still trying to figure out profit targets for trading the Daily chart. Ideas:

- Exit if a counter-position reversal forms.

- Trail Stop-Loss until hit, or a counter-position reversal forms.

- Static profit target.

- Use timeframe smaller than the Daily to determine likely danger zones and exit when price reaches the zone.

- Maybe a combination of some of the above.


Stocks:

Decided to start looking into stocks again. I've experimented with trading stocks via options in the past and had better results than with futures trading. Putting together a watchlist of NYSE listings and will mark up the areas I'm interested in today or tomorrow. Essentially, I'm looking for support-turned-resistance setups, or vice versa, so the stock has to be trending either up or down. No sideways movement for that setup.

I'll look at sideways markets for potential breakout setups. I'm more comfortable with higher timeframe breakouts than with intraday setups. It's easier for me to identify a range's extremes when I have more time to look at the chart, which isn't always an option for me intraday.

November 15, 2023

Decided to shore up my understanding of broadening, head-and-shoulders, and double top/bottom patterns today. I'm using the Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns by Thomas N. Bulkowski, Technical Analysis of Stock Trends by Robert D. Edwards and John Magee, Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets by John J. Murphy, Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits by Richard Schabacker, and Trade Chart Patterns Like the Pros by Suri Duddella.

I still like the Daily chart so far, although I realized today that the whole point of using that timeframe is to see where large traders may dump their positions, which may not be something that happens every day, so I was thinking about using a smaller timeframe with the same rough ideas I have for the Daily, that way there are more potential setups.

I'm seeing some progress with picking areas to watch for the setups I look for. It's been a yuge issue and pain for a while, and it just feels good to not be treading water with the occasional near-drowning. I'm beginning to "read the water." Feels good, man.

November 17, 2023

Spent most of the morning and early afternoon reworking my trading plan. Getting close to being able to implement my "new" strategy. Hopefully I'll be able to knock out the rest of my plan over the weekend and be ready to go with the SIM account by Monday. I know where to look and what to look for. All I have to do is wait, and then act at the right time. Hopefully I'm not delusional, because that would suck, not gonna' lie. The jury will have the answer to that question when the PnL results are in after trading in SIM for a bit.

I ended up taking a SIM trade the other day, and I feel guilty about it. I wasn't ready, didn't have any solid rules in place since I'm reworking stuff, but still went ahead and entered short. Those millisecond impulse decisions and their accompanying rationalizations are a pain. The rationalization was basically that because I was using the SIM account, it didn't really matter. Why not experiment a little? Just see what happens. It's all good, man.

WRONG.

Some good news is that I stopped myself from entering a trade later that day after realizing I'd messed up earlier. Progress.

November 18th, 2023

I started reading the PATS Trading Psychology Or Mack's Soapbox thread, and I noticed that there's some overlap between what I'm doing and what he's (Mack) doing. I definitely don't want to come across as someone who just relabels concepts, and then presents them as new or original ideas. While I have renamed some things for personal reasons (paranoia basically), pretty much everything I look at/for has been discovered prior to my seeing or talking about it. Internally I just give credit to whoever originally talked about any given concept, but I may need to make more of an effort to externalize that.

I started re-reading the first Market Wizards. It's humbling and inspiring that a lot of these guys didn't start out as instant successes, and that even after they became relatively successful, they still made mistakes. Hell, Michael Marcus blew up several accounts before making $30,000,000. Paul Tudor Jones lost 60%-70% of his accounts' equity in '79, and then went on to short the '87 crash. If they can mess up, then maybe I don't have to be so hard on myself when I mess up. I can learn to accept mistakes as part of the game, while still doing my best to avoid them, and try to learn from them as best as I can.


Long-Term Goals:

I'd like to eventually participate in the World Cup Trading Championship, and the U.S. Investing Championship. However! I would only enter if I could enter under a pseudonym. I don't care about the media deals and all that crap, and being famous would complicate the hell out my life. It would be fun to compete though. Larry Williams holds the all-time record for the WCTC with a whopping 11,376% return. Would feel good to surpass that, not gonna' lie. If I aim for the stars, then I might reach the moon--or crash and burn! Or fail to launch altogether! Ideally, I'd like to compete during at least one bear market, and one sideways market too. Not saying that I'm hoping for a bear market though, because I know that declining markets usually imply hard times for people. Just, ya' know, if there happens to be a bear market, it would be fun to compete.

That's nothing but a dream at this point though. I need to get to the point where I'm actually making money first before any of that can happen, lol.

November 20th, 2023

I wasn't able to get everything done over the weekend, but I've got everything pretty much wrapped up now. There are some sections on candlestick patterns that I need to flesh out, but that's not something that needs to get done immediately. I'm not gonna' lie guys, I'm close to burnt out. I've spent the last I-don't-even-know-how-many months pretty much obsessing over charts. I wake up thinking about price action and go to sleep thinking about price action. I just can't do it anymore. This is it. I'm either right, or I'm wrong. If I'm right, great. If I'm wrong, not great, but trading has helped me grow as a person, and I'm thankful for that.

But, I'm exhausted. I wrote a 35-page trading plan and then discovered some new shit that rendered half of it basically useless. Half of my work, just out the window. Gone. It needed to be done though, so it is what it is.

I've got some pretty ambitious plans for my life, some of which require large amounts of capital (hello reason for trading). There are people that I want to help. I want to buy time for the people I love.* I've got ideas for startups, some of which would help people, some would just entertain, and their natures pretty much require that they remain privately controlled, so no outside funding for me. If I can't pull it off, I can't pull it off, but I'm gonna' try either way.

*My view is that when you're born into the world, your time is not your own. It's one of, if not THE most precious resources that any of us have in my opinion, and you don't typically get to spend it the way you want to. There are no refunds either. If I could "buy" time for people so that they could spend it how they truly wanted to, that would help to soothe my soul a little.


WARNING: GRAPHIC Personal Stuff, Feel Free to Skip
Trigger Warning: Suicide and Abuse Are Discussed

I grew up in a shitty trailer park. We didn't have a lot of money, and my parents beat the hell out of each other until one of them finally decided to leave. Why were my parents like this? They both grew up in hyper-religious and incredibly abusive environments. One parent had a mother who was insane and a father who enabled the insane behavior. They both beat their children. The other parent had a father who beat the children with anything he could get his hands on, and a mother who thought that criticism was the best way to show love. So, my parents were fucked up.

All of the kids in the trailer park were fucked up. I will not be descriptive. It was bad.

I got in trouble when I was a kid. A lot. The parent that was around ignored the many complaints from teachers and other parents. To this day, I don't know why. Childhood blended into adolescence, and then into "troubled youth." Between the ages of 15-19, I tried to kill myself three times. I had a close friend who succeeded where I failed, and I was too self-absorbed to notice the warning signs. I dropped out of high school in 10th grade. My last recorded GPA was 1.57. I got married when I was young (19) and was an abusive husband for years. The weight of knowing that you destroyed a person you love is beyond what I can describe. I'm now in my late 20s, and things have thankfully improved.

I got my GED. I quit hard drugs. I don't drink as much as I used to. I quit cigarettes. I think at this point it's safe to say that I've conquered what was a consuming porn addiction. I do not abuse anymore. I still struggle with my anger, but I'm a far cry from the tyrant that I used to be. I'm further along in accepting that even though I've been a terrible person, I can still do good things.

This is who I am. I'm sorry.

I don't know why I'm sharing any of this. Maybe it's because I feel like I'm at the end of a chapter in my life. Maybe it's because I'm so fucking tired. Also, to the Mods, if any of this is too graphic, then my bad. Please delete the post if so.

November 21, 2023

FOMC day, so I wasn't expecting a lot of volatility before 2:00 PM. I'm glad I use two different economic calendars because AMP's didn't have the FOMC Minutes listed for today. Thankfully DailyFX did. I don't trade past 1:50 PM on Fed days, and if there isn't a lot of movement during the morning then there's just not a whole lot I can do. Moving forward I might just take Fed days off.

Took one trade in SIM this morning. Low risk relative to potential reward. I followed my rules. I didn't exit early. I didn't adjust my Stop-Loss before the market gave me a reason to. I exited after price reached my target, and the market's behavior appeared to change. Worked out this time.

A second setup formed a bit later, but I skipped it because this time the risk was too high compared to the potential reward. I don't have written rules for this aspect of my trading yet. It just didn't feel right to short so close to the floor.

November 22, 2023

Took one trade on the short side this morning in the SIM account. There were some issues with my thinking, a bit before and during the trade. I have specific criteria that must be met to warrant exiting early. However, there was a price level that I was concerned about, and decided on the fly that I would exit if I saw signs of aggressive buying. This is not part of my plan. I'll make some time today or tomorrow to come up with a rough outline for how I want to deal with situations like this morning in the future.

That being said, I did not exit the trade incorrectly. I just planned to exit the trade incorrectly if specific price action developed. So, I'm uncomfortable with that aspect of the trade, but I did well other than that. I waited until price reached my target, and then watched for a behavioral change in the market. When that happened, I exited according to plan.

I adjusted my Stop-Loss when the market gave me a reason to. I did experience some confusion at one point, but I cleared it up by trying to calm down, and rationally evaluate the problem.

Something I've noticed that I struggle with is that I get emotionally wrung out after a trade, especially if I'm in the trade for a bit. Makes it incredibly tempting to stop for the day if the trade is a success. In the past, it's also made it more difficult to stop trading when I'm losing. Weird. I'll be thinking about this until I figure out what to do about it.

Fade 

November 22, 2023 Something I've noticed that I struggle with is that I get emotionally wrung out after a trade, especially if I'm in the trade for a bit.

Consider using a trailing stop. That way the trade is set it and forget it. You don't have to think or be emotionally involved.
A method of cutting losses and letting winner run.