Hello!
After being in and around the forums here for a few months and just recently started contributing to the 5 year T-Notes thread, Ive decided its time to go elite and make my trading journal public to this wonderful community. So here it goes!
Ive been trading futures for about 3 years now. Most of that time has been developing and testing different strategies, systems, trying different markets and styles of trading. Ive basically been a sponge, learning as much as I can. In that time I have been live trading on and off between periods of learning and testing. This has basically got me nowhere but for a slow and steady decline in my capital. The positive is that it has brought me to the stage Im at now.
The methods that I have developed are an accumulation of what I have learnt about the markets and myself over the past few years. Up until recently I have always seen trading as trying to find a solution to a problem, so naturally I was constantly learning how to find ways to place and manage trades. I had a hard time trading the systems I developed, and in hindsight they probably werent very good systems anyways!
I noticed that there was something going on with my psyche whenever I would take winning or losing trades, especially with losing trades I would feel abnormally anxious. I found myself asking the question, Why didnt this trade work out? or How did this trade work out anyways? An answer as simple as a statistical distribution of my systems edge wasnt enough for me, and I know that could be intellectual suicide in a trading environment but still, I felt something was missing.
It was at this point I knew more chart analysis, patterns, trading styles, or indicators and the like wouldnt help me and instead I had learn about how the market functioned. Once I had my answer I realized that the reason why my trades didnt work had nothing to do with why I got into them in the first place! My strategy didnt fit my beliefs about the marketplace, it was all backwards.
So I started from scratch and instead of developing another system to trade the markets, I started to develop a method to understand the markets. This led me away from a top-down systematic approach and more towards a bottom-up discretionary one. I felt better already, Im no longer trying to get it right beforehand. I understand trading is a skill set and I have to better develop it to succeed.
However the years of setbacks had left a scar. My biggest weakness at the moment is execution. Im awfully hesitant to enter trades, I over analyze and find reasons to not take them or I lose focus and miss the trades.
Its this self-destructive behavior that I am here to overcome and posting my trades for feedback will make me accountable and Ill have a better chance of doing so.
Im currently focused only on the execution of my trades, Im not looking to maximize my return or better enhance my strategy (yet). First I have to get over this hump. A big influence on my trading has been the order flow work taught by Peter Davies of Jigsaw Trading. Im using a drill he had spoken about that some Prop firms use and thats to set a hard target at 2 ticks and a hard stop at 3 and just try to break even on all trades (this is plausible b/c I trade a slower market).
Read the order flow and execute trades efficiently at the levels determined by my methodology. Once I get better at this I can move forward and start getting on with how to better manage my positions and exits (something I believe to be a key in trading success).
Thank you to those who read this novel of a post, I felt it important that whomever ends up reading this journal to understand where Im coming from but also this was for me. Getting all this down into words helped me solidify where Im at so I can later measure how far Ive come.