How it all happened & the Trader Support Group
First the market started off very strong yesterday. It gapped up and was pushing to new highs on some pretty nice volume. I got excited by this - “finally my frustration with August will end, the market will break out and I will make a lot of money today,” I thought to myself. So I immediately broke a rule. I started a small position on AKAM before 10:30. It wasn’t off of any bars, so I had some trouble thinking of where to place the stop. Eventually I put in a stop and it was hit. So I started off right away with a small loss. This added to my frustration for the month, but I was still confident in the market and that I would make some money on the day.
My next trade was VRTX:
VRTX started off right away going in my direction, but at around 11:30 I saw weakness in the market and so I decided to close out VRTX at about breakeven when it took a quick dive back to where I bought it. This was a huge mistake. I grew more and more frustrated as VRTX continued to climb all day as I was stopped out of each trade after trade that I opened.
Early on I reached my “3 strikes and you’re out” point in which I have three closed trades on the day and I make myself stop trading. I wish I had. But at the time I knew I wasn’t going to. I’m not completely sure why. Anyway, this is a rule that I am not following - so it is not a good rule for me. I’ve got to come up with something else. I’ve thought about it and I think I have something. I am going to try to set up a routine to my trading that won’t allow this to happen. I’m going to set a maximum number of trades per day. I am also not going to keep track of my running total profit or loss. I am also not going to worry about what day of the month it is. What I am trying to do is make a set routine system of trading that I do the same every day no matter how well or poorly I am doing on the month and no matter what day of the month it is. I want to get very ingrained in the routine of this system that won’t allow for any more “worst days” but will still make very profitable days possible. I am going to try to completely stick to this throughout September and October to see what results I can get from it.
I will stop doing the week in review series, and only do montly reviews of my trading.
After a horrible day, when I think about posting the results to this site, at first I dread it. I’m ashamed and embarrassed to have to put up about how sucky I traded. I don’t have the strength to do it. But then it is refreshing to get it out and think it over. It’s kind of like a trader’s support group - which is really nice to have. But it’s unfair that in this forum I am the only one who can talk about my trading losses. So I have set up an uglychart.com Trader’s Support Group so that other traders can log in and post about their own losses/issues and we can give support. I’ve added the link to the sidebar.
