This journal is an elite-exclusive resurrection of my brief, previous journal ( on this site.
Juggling the screenshots and trade-by-trade breakdowns on here began to get exhausting. In addition, since then, I've refined my approach to be much simpler, and I primarily am shifting my journaling goals to the psychological/mental side of trading.
I've been trading for several years and have experienced a lot of the ups and downs, as I'm sure everyone else has. Nothing I write here is intended to be mind-blowing - everyone knows "respect your stops" and "don't revenge trade", etc.
But rather, it's to log the progression of my own re-learning, whenever something strongly (and recently) resonates within me, as I continue my trading career.
I'll start with my recent "re-discovery":
Trade smaller.
Psychologically and emotionally, I found it very difficult to cope with the reality that I needed to trade smaller. Due to personal reasons (regarding withdrawals/savings), my current trading account is much smaller than it was in previous years. I've since been playing around with the micros (MNQ, MES) and seeing a lot more success in my mental edge.
Apart from the obvious benefits (see: risk of ruin, margin requirements, etc.), I've found that it allows me to stop booking profits early.
Being mentally used to making $X in a given day/trade/week has made it much easier to stop micro-managing trades. When a trade starts giving me heat, I don't mind it so much, because I'm trading so small that I can let it hit my full stop-out without much pain (in terms of mental capital and account capital). So I might eat 3-4 full stops and not really be upset or frustrated.
On the flip side, I'm also better at letting my winners run.
My current system gives me two pre-determined targets for all my trades, because I like to trade in thirds (e.g. putting on 6 lots, 12, 15, etc.). Let's say my first two targets are 4 points out, and then 8 points out. When I was (foolishly) trading bigger, I might've taken half off at 3.5 points. The thinking, of course, was that I'm up $X and I don't want to give it all back!
But no, now that I'm trading smaller, that $X that I'm up is "so small" that I don't mind giving it back in order to see if my targets will be hit.
Going Forward
Anyway, that's all I got for my opener. My goal is to continue strengthening my mental game so I can build up my account and size up slowly (basically until I'm comfortable trading 3-lots of crude again :becky:).