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Ok where shall i start... well, i'm from the UK and i day trade Indicies, and occasionally EUR/USD... my fave is the Dow Jones. I 1st started trading about 4 years ago with IG index, i made some tragic tragic mistakes many times over, and the times that i did get lucky i'd just do something stupid like quadruple my position size and then lose the entire account in a trade. I was in a stable job and could afford to lose money, it was pretty much just gambling at the start of my trading quest.
Anyway after years of messing up, i started to learn how to chart read... i have had so many ups and downs, for anyone who knows my user name you may know me from another forum, i had a journal there... and it seemed like at the start things were going perfect, my win rate was exceptional but then BOOM, many people had not seen a n00b perform like that but then a terrible day comes, i lose control and lose -500 points in one day which swallowed my entire capital.
After studying my reason for my account blow up (which has happened many times) it seems that even once i get to a healthy sized account, if i have a loss i try to win it back, and then spiral in to a state of frenzy and then lose control. Anyway putting that aside, i believe i do have a talent but this loss of control continues to haunt me. Quite soon i plan to open a new trading account, a well known Futures firm and they have some interesting facilities. Where basically you can set a certain amount as a max loss of points per day, and once hit your account is locked.
I've heard people say "if you can't control your emotions then you should not trade" but i don't believe this to be true, there is a facility that is available to help me with my biggest downfall so i may as well use it. And i'll configure my account to have a max loss of 50 points in a day and then it just switches off. With this in place i feel i can focus on my good qualities, i'd love to get 20 points a day consistently. I'll be starting a journal up very soon, and i hope it's interesting. I'm confident, but need all the help i can get, i have read zero books, i simply learned by trial and error.
Hi Doomberg. Thanks for the fine intro. When you are talking about "losing control" are you mainly referring to increasing lot size in an effort to gain back the previous losses of the day? I've had the exact same problems too and am always aware and worried it could happen again. It's often more common than reported. i.e. many retail traders add lot size to losers than it gets worse as the trend continues going opposite their direction. Most likely the main reason for quick account blowups however it's named or referred to in the sad anecdotes. Best of luck in improving your trading.
Hey, thanks for the links... and yes it was one of my main issues... however after speaking to a well known futures broker he has offered a system where i can lock my account's position size, so for example with the mini dow you could say "1 contract per $1000 that's in the account" and each time your account doubles, you can call him and say "ok, allow my max position to be X amount of contracts" and also as i said, if you want to have a maximum capital loss in one day, you can have that arranged too... it's Infinity Futures, and no lol... i don't work for them, i'm sure other brokers offer similar services, i'm excited to see how this improves my trading, as my discipline sucks. I hate it when people say "if you can't control your emotions you should just give up trading"
Your welcome. Big Mike posted me that link of FT71's intervention after I had a similar blowup in my journal (lost a few weeks gain). Nice to hear infinity futures does that. I've been trying to get stuck to losers less by doing more stop&reverse strategies, fixed partial profit targets and overall striving to be better at entries and reading price action turns of direction.
