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Hello everyone and welcome to my trading journal.
I will post my daily performance reviews here, together with my thoughts (or ramblings) related to trading.
A bit about me
I've been trading futures on and off for 3 years, but for the past 12 month I've been showing up to my trading platform every day. Back in the day I used to trade micros on a small personal account, but nowdays I've made the transition to prop firms.
I managed to get funded once, about a year and a half ago, and promptly lost the account the next week. How typical.
Since then I've never managed to pass an evaulation again. I've come close MANY times, but my emotions always got the best of me in the end. It has definitely been a challenging journey in terms of mental capital.
Despite the many failures, I've managed to improve quite a bit since last year, having long periods (months) of breakeven performance followed by blowups caused by frustration.
NOTE: I know I could play the numbers game and pass an evaluation next week. Prop firms rules have become very forgiving lately. A lot of people have this approach, but it is a fallacy. You will have to pay the setup fee, which is where the prop firm makes the money, and then you will lose the account because you got there thanks to sheer luck and trading too big. I'm trading the evaluation as if it was the funded account.
How I trade
My approach to trading the markets has varied quite a bit, both in terms of strategy and in terms of instrument traded. I tried ES, NQ, CL, GC, sometimes taking only one or two trades a day and sometimes taking a lot more.
This variety was very beneficial, because it allowed me to understand the type of trader that I am and the style that suits me. Turns out I hate having a strict, deterministic approach. A fluid, intuitive approach suits me a lot better, and this is true for every aspect in my life, not only trading.
An interesting example: I absolutely hate planning holidays. I much rather prefer just buying a ticket and go explore. I traveled all through Europe like this, no plan whatsoever, having a blast.
Some people are the exact opposite and want to plan everything beforehand. I think that in order to be a profitable trader your style should suit your personality, and it just so happen that I feel at home with a loose approach.
When I realized this fact about me, I switched my trading from taking very few scalps a day on the mini contracts to taking many scalps per day on the micros, trying to flow with the market movements.
I did this on a sim account at first, but since last year trading on sim has lost any value for me because I can literally print money on it, especially if I trade actively. This means that the delta in performance between sim and live is psychological.
I take around 100 trades per day, and I divide my day into 30 minutes sessions. I trade MNQ exclusively for now, but I want to expand to other products in the future.
On average I'm in the market for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Yes commissions are very high, eating up around half of my profits.
The biggest advantage of taking so many trades is that you end up with a large sample size. This means that if you are not trading emotionally, your edge will show up within the span of one single day instead of one month (for somebody who takes 1 or two trades a day).
I have no strict rules for entries, my goal is to get in tune with how the market is moving and trade intuitively. It requires a lot of focus, which is why I take breaks at the end of every 30 minute period.
How I look at the market
I use a 400 volume chart on the MNQ, which moves VERY fast. I also have a 6000 volume chart that I look from time to time to see where we are in the bigger picture.
I believe that an auction is a function of price and volume, not time, so I don't use time-based charts. I use ninjatrader and I have a rithmic connection.
Where I am right now
I've been trading this evaluation for two weeks now, and after a rocky start things are moving in the right direction now. Here is equity chart:
The statistics and equity line are calculated with my own tools after having exported the trades from R trader pro.
Why I'm starting this journal
The reason why I haven't been successful with prop firm evaluations is that sometimes I get frustrated, throw caution to the wind and get myself in trouble. I need accountability for my actions.
What prompted me to start today is the fact that last week I made some really stupid mistakes. I know that the equity line looks great, but it doesn't show open PnL, it counts trades as flat-to-flat.
Two times last week I found myself in a 500$ drawdown because I decided to not accept a losing trade. I managed to scalp around those positions, adding and removing size, improving my average price until a pullback finally brought me back to 0 on the trade.
The maximum size I got up to was 7 micros, which in the grand scheme of things is not a lot. But it goes completely against my trading approach, and being stuck in a trade is absolutely mentally draining. The goal of this trading journal is to prevent me from ever making mistakes like this again.
I never made this mistake the week prior, so I consider it a new bad habit that I need to stop now before it blows up in my face. I got away with it because I'm trading micros, but if the MNQ had moved another 150 points without any meaningful pullback the evaluation would have been blown.
I've also set up a 150$ hard stop on daily pnl in R trader pro. I fully expect hitting this limit someday this week, and my goal will be to accept the losing day and move on.
Here we go with the first day of this journal, unfortunately it's a loser.
I'm at -153.12 after commissions, so I was able to observe my daily stop loss. As you can see from the stats below, my average winning trade is bigger than my average losing trade, the problem is that my win % is at 34%. Usually it's between 47% and 55%.
I never found myself stuck in a position (which is the mistake I'm currently trying to avoid) but I still made some lesser mistakes. During the first 30 minutes I was breakeven for most of the time, but in the last 3 minutes i became a bit frustrated and opened too many trades. Instead of becoming defensive after taking two losses in a row, I became aggressive and tried to make it back to BE. I was only down $16 at that point. In a few quick trades I took the account to -75, and forced myself to take a break.
The next 30 minutes went better, and I ended breakeven. I still took some stupid trades due to frustration though. This time it wasn't because of a loss, it was because price action had slowed down considerably and the market kept turning around just before my target.
The final 30 minutes were quick: to put it simply I overtraded again and in 3 minutes I was down to the max daily loss of 150 dollars.
So in conclusion:
While I managed to avoid making the egregious mistakes from last week, I was unable to find a good mental state to trade. By the end of the session I was very tired, way more than usual. I think that today was simply not my day. I was having trouble adjusting to the reduced volatility of today compared to last week.
Tomorrow I won't be able to trade during my regular time, so I'll just skip the day and get back at it on Wednesday.
2024-05-01
Glad to post a winning day today, up $143.86. I made back what I lost yesterday and my performance overall (not just in terms of PnL) was a lot better.
I usually prefer trying to make at least $200 on the days that are going well, but once I git back to account highs I felt myself getting a bit too fearful, so I just decided to step away for the day.
I still traded for a solid 2 hour, so four 30 minute sessions. Here are the stats:
I only started to get up to speed after 10:30 EST. Once I was up $70, I switched from trading 1 lots to 2 lots, and of course lost the next two trades. I didn't allow this to influence me, kept my focus and made it back. The last session (11:00 to 11:30) was the best one, with above average statistics.
Overall, today's performance is much closer to my baseline, with decent win %, winners bigger than losers, and max winner bigger than max loser. The expectancy per contract of $1.34 is also close to my goal of $1.5.
Above all, I didn't make any stupid mistakes today and I never put myself in a position of ruining the entire day in a single trade.
So a nice trading day in the end, I'll get back at it tomorrow!
2024-05-02
Today was incredibly tough for me. PnL is -155.32, all thanks to frustration.
The problems started right at market open, when my rithmic datafeed started lagging. Honestly this happens way too often, the data on the charts gets behind the real market by 5, 10, even 20 seconds.
I have an indicator that tells me when it starts to lag, and today between 09:30 and 10:00 every time there was big volume coming in (e.g. during a break lower) I kept having issues. I never had those kind of problems with denali or CQG.
Anyway, this is still not a good excuse to take emotional trades. I kept getting frustrated by the fact that I couldn't participate on the good moves because of the lag, and this made me very prone to revenge trading.
From 09:30 to 10:00 my performance was very bad lots of frustration and FOMO because the lag made me miss some really good trades. Then after a short break I came back, accepted the tech issues with stoicism, and traded really well. I got back to BE and lowered my guard. Guess what, I got frustrated again and in the span of two minutes I lost $90. I became aggressive instead of defensive after two losses in a row.
But the worst mistake came in the last session, at 11:30. I was only down $70 on the day, about half of my max daily loss. Not too bad after all, considering all the mistakes I had made. Two trades almost got to my target before reversing and I had to cut them for a scratch, and this really triggered me.
Once I opened the next position, for some reason my brain said YOLO. Let's bet the rest of my daily stop in one position. Instead of accepting a small loss, I added size to a loser and made my stop loss bigger. The auto liquidator closed the position shortly after and that was it.
You can see this final mistake on the equity line below:
The good thing about today is that I stopped trading once I hit my daily stop. I know from experience that if I had continued I would have lost a lot of money very quickly.
So in conclusion this is a "we learned something today" kind of day. Only that I already know that I shouldn't do these mistakes, which makes me even more frustrated.
If you're experiencing chart lag, it could be related to an underpowered CPU. Try moving to a higher timeframe. If the lag disappears, it's probably CPU - one or more of your indicators may be involved. I had something similar happen because I was using a laptop, even though it was brand new from 2023. Moving to a 10-core 10900K water-cooled machine I had built with dedicated GPU (which is just a 1660Ti I had lying around) from 2020 was enough to resolve the issue to my satisfaction.
You are breaking your rules far too often to be trading with real money. Test your plan in a simulator until you can execute flawlessly. You are needlessly inflicting psychological damage on yourself.
It's likely not related to his hardware. It's likely because it's a simulated (not live) data feed, which I suspect are not prioritized by the provider's systems. I've seen the same thing before, on a simulated apex/topstep Rithmic data feed.
Yes I think this is the reason as well. I'm currently trading an apex evaluation account, and I have the suspicion that at the beginning of each month a lot of new people come in, and the servers get overloaded
Thank you for your suggestions, but I seriously doubt it's something wrong with my PC since i never had problems with other datafeeds and I don't have any cpu intesive indicator running.
Regarding trading on a simulator: it's not something useful to me anymore because my issues are related to psychology. The only way I can solve them is by "feeling the heat" with the smallest possible size and learn not to make mistakes. It has become almost impossible for me to have a losing day while trading on demo, which makes me even more frustrated when I'm unable to perform at the same level live.
The problems with frustration that I have are made even worse by the fact that I'm trading on a prop firm evaluation. The ability to just pay a few bucks to start over is so tempting. It makes a trader much more likely to throw caution to the wind because the stakes are so low compared to a real personal account.
I started this journal to help me iron out the last psychological mistakes I make while trading, so today I'm going to talk about something I do quite often: becoming aggressive when I should become defensive and vice-versa.
In the last few days I was able to keep myself accountable and I never found myself stuck in positions that were potentially account-busting, which was the main goal for this week.
The lack of that mistake allowed other "smaller" issues to emerge. The most important one, which is the subject of this post and the mistake I will focus on in the next days, is my trouble with frustration.
Here is the sequence of events that describes this particular behavior:
I'm trading well
One of the following happens:
I take a loss that i feel was "undeserved"
I take a few losing trades in a row
I enter a trade and it immediately goes to my stop (i was completely wrong)
I scratch a trade and open a position in the opposite direction that loses (the original idea was correct and would have won)
Frustration ensues. I start to feel that the market owes me something.
I stop analyzing the price movements like I usually do, and instead I start looking at the market with tunnel vision. At this point my edge has disappeared.
I open a stupid trade which is very likely to lose
I become stubborn. This is especially dangerous if the market happens to be trending, because I can't switch my bias and I take several losing trades in a row.
At this point I'm completely compromised, and I'm in danger to make absolutely disgusting mistakes like adding size and moving my SL to account-threatening levels.
I finally realize what is happening, accept the fact that I once again had an emotional episode, calm down and start trading correctly again.
Keep in mind that I take a lot of trades each day. If you only take 1 or 2, I doubt that you would encounter these types of problems. Your psychological issues would probably be related to impatience, greed, second guessing your analysis, and so on.
During this week I was always able to stop at 6, which is definitely an improvement compared to last week.
My goal for the next few days is to always stop at 3.
I will allow myself to feel frustrated, but I will not open positions based on that feeling. I will become defensive instead of aggressive. My hope is that with time I will stop feeling frustrated altogether, and stop at 2.
Why does this kind of behavior happen? Because our brain is primed for action when we feel threatened. We feel like we must do to something to fix the situation, so we open another trade. This would not happen if our first instinct was to pretend to be dead like some animals do. We would simply not open another trade, and let the danger pass.
On the flipside, when things are going well, we feel the urge to become defensive and avoid risk. We want to preserve what we have and not give it back.
I believe that in order to be a good intraday scalper I need to do exactly the opposite of what my emotions tell me to do. In fact, i can use them as a compass: when I feel frustrated and risk-seeking, that should be my cue to become risk-averse.
So this will be my focus going forward, until I feel confident that I fixed the issue. If you are reading this and feel like you are in a similar situation, I invite you to write it down, it really helps.
The goal of this journal is accountability. If you see me making promises and not keeping them, call me out!
