My stomach starts aching when i read this....sounds like self destruction. I know this, too, but never in that dimension. I donīt think that this is the question of using a hard stop or not. Itīs obviously more the question to admit to be wrong in that special moment. But finding oneself in a "bubble" stops acting adequatly...
Is this solvable??

Do you personally know any successful traders(years)who have never blown an account? I've been reading/studying for half a year now, and it seems that blowing up an account is an active choice on the part of the trader. You have to willingly ram your face into a streak of losses to actually end up at 0 or below. I really don't understand that. Or is there just several trades where the trader decides to risk it all?

I don't mean this at all negatively toward you, but if you have been studying for half a year now, it is time to stop studying and find out what trading is like by actually doing some.

When you have a stake in the game, it is completely unlike what it seems to be when you are just watching it. You will find that trading is mostly about the acceptance and management of risk, and the management of your own reactions when you have money on the line, and are either making it or losing it. Both success and failure have their own psychological/emotional pressures, both can distort your judgment, and learning to handle the issues that both give you is probably more than 80 or 90 percent of what real trading is about. The things that you are able to learn by studying the market are about 10 to 20 percent of the puzzle, if that. Really.

I think from your comments that you have not had to face this by actually being in the middle of it, and if you want to be able to trade, that's where you have to steer your ship, not reading and studying.

I absolutely am not trying to put you down, but getting into the market with some real risk on the line is the only way that you will ever understand anything at all useful about trading.

If you are financially unable to do this, then, for one thing, that is a very good argument against attempting to trade now. Build up a financial position and develop a personal life situation that allows you to have risk capital that you can afford to lose if you have to. By the way, you will lose at least some of it. Then you may understand the answer to your question.

If you need a clearer pathway, look at any of @Big Mike's posts, and read the 6 points he has in his "signature" -- the text that appears at the end of each post. Follow up on them, especially the "Where to start" webinar here:

NinjaTrader 7 to include Monte Carlo Simulator According to Dierk Droth, the VP of Engineering for NinjaTrader, the upcoming NT7 beta will include a Monte Carlo simulator. Monte Carlo sims are a way to produce random data to simulate different types of market scenarios and events, so that your strategy …

If you aren't in the market and don't have something at stake, you are not really studying anything that is either real or helpful, and you really are not learning anything. Sorry to tell you that, but it's the simple truth.

There are many resources here that can help. If you can manage it, an Elite membership can be very valuable because of the many, many Elite-only threads.

Again, I'm not putting you down and not being negative, but you really should take some of this advice seriously, and then work with it in your own way.

It is not the easiest road in the world, as many have found out. But that's what the road is. Doing something else is going to take you somewhere else, but not to trading.

Good luck with this.

Bob.

Edit: this sounds like I am lecturing you. Please forgive that, but I can't think of a better way to say it. I hope something in it is helpful to you, and to anyone else in the same place as well.

Edit 2: I just saw in another thread that you have been trading live for a month now. Good for you. If my assumption about your experience was wrong, I apologize. However, a month is not long (), and the suggestions are still good ones, and will be, I suspect, for a long time. It is still trading psychology that will make you or break you. And you are probably going to have a lot of interesting experiences with it all.

Again, good luck and good trading.

I've blown out 3 times. And quit 3 times. Once, never looking at a chart for 3 yrs. How does a person go from +$120k to -$22k in less than a month? It took 2 more blow outs to learn.

Thanks for the reply. It's good advice. My little time on this forum has already been invaluable. I imagined successful traders as brilliant, calculating logical machines-and come to find out it's just regular people like me. At its core, this game is about intelligence, skill AND knowledge-a combination of chess, poker and real time strategy. It's actually very easy if you are used to monitoring and regulating your emotional reality(which is apparently hard even for the best of them). What I'm lacking right now is the knowledge of individual instrument behaviour over time, and market reactions to announcements-which I suppose will come with time. Kind of feel like I taught myself to fish

On 15 Feb 2007. I lost S$191K trading SGX MSCI Singapore Index futures. After trading for 2 years, I had zero profits and about S$70K of savings left to support a family with 2 young kids. Lowest point in my life.

I blew up my day trading futures account 3x's. The last time was in 2009 when I put on a few large ES shorts. Ready for this: moved my stops!! Total idiot move and I knew better. I lost 125K on a 150K account! Dumbass.

At this point I had 25K left, took a break for two months to try and figure out why I was able to make so much money and then blow it all much faster than I made it. I came down to simple math: trading too big too fast and cutting winners and holding losers! I realized I could not scalp the ES/NQ/YM/TF as it just wasn't for me. I'll leave index future scalp trading to other who can figure it out. I got my ass kicked! I accepted I was not a good index trader. But I committed to making one last attempt at trading when I was ready.

When I jumped back in late 2009 I had a totally different game plan that has worked every since. This strategy works for me and I'm not saying it's a holy grail. I am by no means a great trader...maybe average at best. I took the 25K and put on 1 lot CL swing trades. I traded nothing else then (or now). I never traded choppy days. I pre-set my stops and stuck to it. It took a few months, but I figured out a way to added to winners and cut the losers quicker. I think it took well over a year to build my account from 25K to 50K so I could add 1 or 2 more contracts. In 2012, I was able to start trading a lot bigger while using the same simple strategy.

Nowadays, if I see a choppy day in CL once the cash markets opening, I walk away and trade nothing. When I do trade, I can loose 6 or 7 out of every 10 trades just because price action revisiting levels after adding to winners. However, I am consistent in capturing nice profits on the 3 or 4 winners out of every 10 trades. I still track my performance on a "10 trade cycle". Don't know if this is right or not - it just works for me. If I start losing more or less than 6 or 7 out of 10 times, I know something isn't right. I constantly have to check myself because I have the tendency to trade larger than I should at times.

Am I am profitable? Extremely. But I still loose 60%-70% of trades. I love my losses because I know in my system I must have 6 or 7 losers out of every 10 trades. But I never have big losers because I need the losers to be only small losers in order for me to make any money! To me, accepting a losing trade means I'm actually right and its' time to move closer to a winning trade.

I trade using only simple price action, MA's and volume profiles - I abandoned the pure technical approach along time ago. I don't trade Wed. morning when inventory weekly reports come out. I use no other indicators. My strategy is simple: I stick my toe in the water with anywhere from 1-3 CL contracts and then add 5-7 contracts right around a profit area of +40 ticks. I'll do this maybe once or twice more. It keeps my overall break even/stop rather close, thus, I get stopped more often than not. But when I can catch a nice CL trend of a dollar and a half or more...I can capture monster profits. At the end of the day its no different than fishing and pulling in a bunch of baby carp before you eventually hook Moby Dick. I believe in "keep it simple stupid".

For me personally, I also had the advantage of having a spouse that worked and I did not have the "pressure" to generate income regularly. It gave me a rather large window of time to be a student and try to figure out a system that would eventually work. I think this was the most important factor and I would have definitely failed and never been profitable if I had to generate "x" amount each month to live and pay bills on. I think this is actually the biggest hurdle for new traders to overcome.

These days I don't know if CL will head into the 30's in the 2nd Qtr of 2015 or it we are now at the bottom in the 45-50 area. Don't know...don't care. I think once you start believing you understand the market and can anticipate moves - you then will go broke!

If it's said that 85% of traders pocket small profits and then get cocky and blow their accounts up by taking on just a few huge losses....isn't the inverse the ultimate goal? I know it's hard said than done...but "keeping it simple stupid" can work IMO.