Hello everyone.

Before I start, to anyone who is interested in trading futures but has not started yet, PLEASE JUST DON'T, I'm saving you a lot of trouble and a lot of miserable days.
From how I view it futures trading is worse than gambling addiction. At the casinos the player has a "REALLY HIGH" 49% winning probability! With futures 99% of people lose. Only 1% win, and probably less survive in the long term.
Also, once you realize that you can make $5000 in 5 minutes "IF" you make the right mouse clicks, your brain changes and it will become almost impossible for you to go back to normal life and be happy with a $100 paycheck for 9 hours of work.

----

About me: I'm 36 currently, I was lucky in my early 20s, had a good business, but I started trading futures and lost literally everything in the course of 5-6 years... business, house, car, girlfriend, friends, family, literally everything. And I even tried to kill myself a few times.

I had to quit but I just couldn't. My only options for quitting were:
1. Death
2. Temporary quitting when I had no more money to trade with.
It was just an infinite loop.

Then I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't be able to quit this addiction until the day I die. So for me, in order to live a normal life I had to find a way to coop with it. And that meant that I had to become good enough at it to at least not lose from trading.

And here I am, now I've been trading quite ok for about 2 years. Since September 2022 I have only lost 5 months out of 25. Never lost 2 months in a row. So after many years of suffering I'm finally doing ok.

----

For the journal I'm thinking about posting my entries/exits in real time here then do a recap everyday. Some days I do up to 20 trades so it may make the thread look a bit spammy, hopefully not too much.

About my trading:
- I only do futures, mostly NASDAQ, S&P, CrudeOil and Gold.
- I have two trading styles, sometimes I enter for a short day trade, sometimes I enter for a swing trade where I could hold the position for a few days, I will be mentioning everything in my posts.
- Even if I'm able to enter 4 Mini-Nasdaq contracts, I only enter 1(Never use 100% of your leverage, it really hurts your mentality). From how I view it, a trader with less than $50,000 should only trade with micro contracts. I rarely add positions when price goes the other way, but sometimes I do (MAX 1 time, same size of initial entry).
- For oil, gold, S&P I sometimes enter 2 contracts from the beginning.

LONG CLX24 71.00, TARGET 71.71

LONG NQZ24 20139, STOP 20136.25, TARGET 20145.5

TopKoreanTrader 

LONG NQZ24 20139, STOP 20136.25, TARGET 20145.5

Cancelling this one as it went up without giving me the chance to jump!

LONG NQZ24 20151.75, TARGET 20158, STOP 20148

STOP change to 20145

Nasdaq trade stopped with -$135 loss, oil trade still going currently +510

Have closed the crude oil trade at 7146, have to go to lunch. 355 $ profit for the morning

Just out of curiosity, can you list significant changes that you went through to go from losing everything to not having a single double month loss in the last two years?

This is from psychology to strategy, just so I can understand what was the turning point.

AllSeeker 

Just out of curiosity, can you list significant changes that you went through to go from losing everything to not having a single double month loss in the last two years? This is from psychology to strategy, just so I can understand what was the turning point.

Hi Allseeker,

Yes definitely. I actually think I got better over the years even when I was losing all the time, just couldn't stop blowing up my account every once a while.

Then I switched to micros, stopped rage trading when I took a big loss and I finally stopped blowing up my account over and over. And that is about 2 years ago. So I think it's more of a mentality change + leverage control over greed, since I use the same time charts I used 4 years ago.