I have been trading live since September 15th of this year with the past year doing all of my back testing, paper trading, classes ect. I will start off on my trading plan.
2 Contracts traded from 9:30 to 12 at the latest. Take any and all trades that follow my set up (I wont go in to the details but usually 2-3 per morning) 1 contract is a fixed number at 1.25 points and the other is a runner that gets brought to break even+1 once the profit is at 87.50.
Since September 15th I started very good was up 7.63% in just 2 weeks but since October 6th I have been in a slight slide for my trading dropping down to around 4% still not bad but could be better. Right now I am only taking the first trade of the day with one contract and then after going back to the paper account to do more practice and looking for tweaks. The last 3 days I have just paper traded the full 2 contracts with my full method in place. In just these 3 days I have pulled in $1462.50 worth of profits and I know if I trade this in the live markets I can come very close to replicating this.
My finical position is great right now, really couldn't be better for starting out day trading. But I cant seem to pull the trigger on multiple contracts and taking more than the first trade of the day.
So I am looking for some advice on what I should do or where I should go to help this out. I know trading only 1 contract is killing my p/l so I need to step up at some point, and go for the full method which I know that works.
Here is my journal for people that want to read more in to it.
I'm starting this journal on a public forum so I can keep my self accountable for my mistakes instead of making some BS excuse on why I'm not trading well. This is my second round of live trading the first round had me sitting down around 450$. …
Site Administrator Swing Trader Data Scientist & DevOps
Manta, Ecuador
Experience: Advanced
Platform: My own custom solution
Trading: Emini Futures
Posts: 49,742 since Jun 2009
Thanks: 32,289 given,
97,476
received
You need to give yourself a lot (lot) more time. You can't pull the trigger because you don't have confidence yet to risk more. It takes time, and it's wise to start slow because you will stumble, fall, crash and burn at some point. Better to do it small scale and make sure you have the capital to continue learning after that happens.
You can't rush it is the short answer.
Keep your journal, keep working every day, eventually you'll be comfortable increasing size.