This is my trading journal for my adventures with the DAX30.

I love the DAX, it's very liquid, has tons of trading opportunities within a day for me as I trade it with CFD's leveraged 1:500.

Contrary to popular belief, a 1:500 leverage CFD is not at all more risky - in fact, it's much less risky than 1:1 or 1:100 - you just have to do the math right!

So 6 months down the road - a bunch of money donated to the markets, a lot wiser, a lot more professional - only one ridiculous little issue remains: DON'T FORGET THE STOP LOSS!

So sometimes I forget, and it goes bad, and I fail to exit manually because I'm still bad at ruthlessly cutting losses - and bad turns to worse, turns to hell in a handbasket.

I'm going crazy about this. Forgetting the stop loss even once can ruin my entire day in the DAX.

I can read the order flow. I know how the professionals operate and how they eat the retail trader for lunch. I have 60%/40% win/loss ratio and a nice positive expectancy (if I ignore this mistake pattern). So I'm sorted, would it not be for a ridiculous crack in my psychology.

This is why trading is 100% psychology! Without it - it doesn't matter how good your system is or how fancy your market reading skills are. So it's 100%.

This is the final remaining issue before I can live as a trader and achieve financial freedom.

Right now, I gain 50-100 euros a day to the market and then lose 100-150 because of one stupid mistake a day... or I have a winning day, and the next day I start out by erasing all profits from the previous day... from one silly stop-loss related mistake. I get sloppy/lazy/unfocused/what ever it is, the end result is the same - no stop loss - and if its a bad call - I'm screwed.

If I could fix this, I would quickly compound up to several hundred euros per day...for starters.

My system works faboulously well (It's no secret, just a cfd provider that allows fractional lots + high leverage combined with spreadsheet math)- I can gain 2-5% a day with 1-5 trades - even more if I catch the entire daily trend and scale into it - but this only works if my psychology works - which is an on/off thing... it can't just work most of the time!

Tomorrow we begin! I will post all my trades and what goes on in my psychology publically - hopefully I will prevent my mistakes this way. :-)

Also, to make this a bit more interesting, every time I screw up from now on, there has to be some kind of punishment, something that I really don't want to do...

Hi, congratz for the journals and thanks for sharing, i've been looking @ DAX for past 6 months and trading it for nearly 2 months now with mixed result, still can't handle the pace ... it just so fast (i'm trying to scalping it on 1 min).
Good Luck and Looking forward to your journey.

I look at it as - its as fast as you want it to be. Fast is mostly related to how quickly the price moves once you are in a position, isn't it? It's a psychological thing, I don't think it's about the DAX really because if you cut your position in half or double it - the perception of speed radically changes.

In my spreadsheet I adapt the size of position, the risk (stop loss distance) after how liquid it is (daytime, aftermarket, range day). Experiment and find a sweet spot that works for you.

Short @ 9744
Target: None, we'll see where this goes.

In profit but stop loss moved to zero as market started to range and might pop up instead.

I think this day might have a 70+ point drop in it somewhere.

EDIT: It dropped 20 points while I wrote that. :-)



EDIT:
Exit @ 9720 - This looks too muddy... i suspect it will bounce back up...

Long @ 9728
Profit target: 30+ points.

I think this will make a rocket launch upwards... probability 70%?



EDIT: Well... Nope it didn't, stopped out at a 5 point stop, reversed the trade, I'm now in a profitable short.



EDIT: This journal is fantastic for my trading dicipline! Seeing some stopping volume now around 9700 but I think it will punch through that and the bottom might be 80 points down depending on US open so I'll hold on to this one... stop at zero so I'm good.

EDIT: Exit @ 9706 - Reverse trade, as its going up again....I think.... stop loss still ON =)



EDIT: Nah... I don't think this will work... got out at break even, time for lunch! + 2,5% for the day.

One more before lunch... come on baby light my fire...



Yep, exit @9722 a bit risky 3R trade so it was a nice little catch still.

Taking aim at todays potential huge drop.

Enter @ 9711



EDIT: Still alive, placing shorts as I went up, - this time, slightly larger since that appears to be the buying climax, and it should be downhill from here, if not, the loss is acceptable as the initial trades were small, anticipacting a violent move. If we go south beyond the starting point, I will scale in as we go.

Psychologically - this was a screwup.



EDIT: Hahahaaaaaa!! I love the DAX! - Exited @ account +1% @9720 :-) But I still earned a punishment 2km jog tonight for this screwup.

I guess I'm long from here then



EDIT: Exit @9751, 2 x 20 points, thank you very much.

And....long again at the pullback.



EDIT: Wow, that was brief... stopped out at breakeven.

EDIT: At it again at 9744 ... going up.



EDIT: Way too much supply from above to go anywhere north... I'm sidelining for now to await the shakeout or downmove