richw 

From the images you posted, it seems that you are a discretionary trader, overall, like me, and your trade ideas seem to be pretty good. Your stops are likely not large enough for the timeframes that you are trading. I encourage you to go to SIM and test your ideas and get comfortable with whether your ideas and strategies are working well, and then, go back to live trading.

Hey Richw!
Thank you for your reply and feedback. I find it very helpful. I will definitely go back to SIM at least for a week and evaluate from there. If I can find assurance and statistical edge in my style of trading, I will continue with live trading. Otherwise stay in SIM and optimize the strategy until a statistical edge can be proven and improved.

I now know this was the step that I just didn’t wanna see I have to take (again). Sometimes it needs a step back, only to come back again stronger.

Thanks again, have a great weekend!

You're welcome! I encourage you to keep posting charts and info about your trades, even on SIM, here in your journal. I wish you the best in your trading!

Mysterion 

Hey Richw! Thank you for your reply and feedback. I find it very helpful. I will definitely go back to SIM at least for a week and evaluate from there. If I can find assurance and statistical edge in my style of trading, I will continue with live trading. Otherwise stay in SIM and optimize the strategy until a statistical edge can be proven and improved. I now know this was the step that I just didn’t wanna see I have to take (again). Sometimes it needs a step back, only to come back again stronger. Thanks again, have a great weekend!

richw 

I encourage you to go to SIM and test your ideas and get comfortable with whether your ideas and strategies are working well, and then, go back to live trading.

richw 

You're welcome! I encourage you to keep posting charts and info about your trades, even on SIM, here in your journal. I wish you the best in your trading!

I think both of these are good advice. Often there is a drawback to sim, which is that it doesn't make the trader deal with the psychological issues of risk. But sometimes it is better to temporarily just cut those issues out and focus on being able to execute something that works in the first place. Then return to live once it's working well. (Dealing with risk is an entirely different set of issues that will need to be handled sometime, of course.)

I also think that a real trade journal can be very useful. Not just occasional charts, but something where you post about your trades regularly. Like everything, journaling has a downside too, and the downside to a journal is that it can take a lot of your time and attention, and sometimes even make you focus on the journal more than trading. But if you can manage the time and attention elements wisely, being open in your thinking and re-thinking about your trades (as well as available for others' comments) can be a very good thing.

If you choose this course of action, I suggest that opening another thread in the "Trading Journals" section would be a good idea. Just changing the name from "What am I doing wrong?" to something that is about your trades in a non-negative way may make a mental/attitude difference. Also, people would be able to tell what you were doing and could comment with that in mind.

Hope this works well for you.

Bob.

bobwest 

I think both of these are good advice. Often there is a drawback to sim, which is that it doesn't make the trader deal with the psychological issues of risk. But sometimes it is better to temporarily just cut those issues out and focus on being able to execute something that works in the first place. Then return to live once it's working well. (Dealing with risk is an entirely different set of issues that will need to be handled sometime, of course.) I also think that a real trade journal can be very useful. Not just occasional charts, but something where you post about your trades regularly. Like everything, journaling has a downside too, and the downside to a journal is that it can take a lot of your time and attention, and sometimes even make you focus on the journal more than trading. But if you can manage the time and attention elements wisely, being open in your thinking and re-thinking about your trades (as well as available for others' comments) can be a very good thing. If you choose this course of action, I suggest that opening another thread in the "Trading Journals" section would be a good idea. Just changing the name from "What am I doing wrong?" to something that is about your trades in a non-negative way may make a mental/attitude difference. Also, people would be able to tell what you were doing and could comment with that in mind. Hope this works well for you. Bob.

Hi Bob!

Thank you for the advice, especially about the psychological perspectives of SIM, regarding the Risk.. You are right about that, so I've decided to have a fixed SL in every trade, which will be a 5pt max range for most of my trades. However, now I will be testing everything on SIM until I can improve my game overall, possibly work on my winrate and see if I can reach where I want to.

Also, I will proceed right now to open a Thread in the Trading Journals Section and post my daily conclusions and results there.

Thanks again for your advice and hope to see you around :-)

Have a great start of the new week!

I have a friend with the same issue. I am trying to get him to change his mindset to systematic trading from discretionary for the reasons you listed. You can then utilize backtesting to get an idea of how your strategy has performed.

Advice from FuturesTrader 71
(not my info)

Traders: The holy grail of trading and the best advice I can give you about trading futures is below...

1) Your job is align with the market.
It is not to be a mind-reader,
a forecaster of economies,
an analyst

2) To win, you have to have 4 things correct in YOUR trading timeframe:

1. Direction
2. Stop size
3. Entry location
4. Targets

3) Our goal as traders is to SAMPLE the market as many times as possible and at the lowest risk that fits the time frame and product

4) NONE of this matters if we aren't here tomorrow because we blew up today or ran out of money. So it is a cliche, but is the truth:
RISK COMES FIRST.

5) If I suck at managing risk but have the greatest trading plan and edge in the world, then I might as well go to Vegas...at least the drinks are free while I lose. Note: This is the 3rd time risk control is mentioned here

6) I'm not as good as my last trade. Living this way is intolerable, volatile and will wreck my psychology.
I'm as good as MY BEST EXECUTION of my edge. Period.
Win, lose or scratch, I executed the trade according to plan and it had a 50/50 chance.
I CANNOT CHANGE THIS FACT!

7) The outcome of the very next trade is CERTIFIABLY AND POSITIVELY RANDOM.
I can't change that. So all I can manage is risk (mentioned for the 4th time here).
So randomness and luck are built into the game.

8) If randomness is built into the game, then my stop is simply the price of the token I need to determine if the next round will pay me or cost me. My stop is just a fee to participate. Nothing in life exists without a fee to participate (opportunity cost or time cost mostly)

9) To survive all of the above, we must have an understanding of how our market/product trades, what moves it and how we align ourselves WITH IT not it with us. It isn't personal. The market is a force of nature, align or get run over. Period. No sense arguing.

10) Only your family cares abot how you feel. Market doesn't. That isn't its job. Market is infinitely providing opportunity to win or lose. Relentless like the ocean or the wind. Our job is to find our way to use its force to carry our position to profit with minimum risk.

11) Most people personalize and complicate it beyond what it really is. That's part of learning. But we become pros when we shed the complications & see the auction then layer a way (setups) to engage & manage trades

12) We can't study our losses away.
So many people fail by trying & trying.
They are just there in the randomness. Stick to the plan (if we have one).

13) HAPPY SURFING. In the end, we can't take it with us. It is just a journey. Trading is just one heck of a ride and a supreme mentor/educator about who we really are. We can always reason away our bullshit in a regular job. The market doesn't allow it.

14) And finally, let's forgive and love ourselves. We do our best. That's all we can do. Enjoy the suffering and the victories alike. Even in quitting trading, we are A LOT wiser for it. Again, we do the same in real life, the results are just not immediate.

GOOD LUCK!
****************************************
P.S Mark Douglas has some great videos and books about trading. FWIW

I have mentioned this in other posts. Focus on your process not on the P&L.

I suggest you have a written plan.

Did you follow your plan? If not why not?

Mysterion 

Hello everyone! I am looking for advice. I've funded my own Account to scalp NQ/ES Futures in February 2023 but I just can't turn around to be profitable. When I started trading my live account, I was slightly profitable. My Winrate is a bit better than 50% (now after trading live for approx. 3 months), which should give me a decent edge IMO. Before that, I day-traded crypto futures for about a year (I gave up on that, now I only do spot/swing trades in crypto). I have been journaling every single trade.. why I entered it, why it didn't or did work out etc., and therefore could work on my trading skills, to improve constantly and implement more rules for my trades. A big lack at the beginning definetely was my almost non existent risk management and a lack of patience. I have put a lot of discipline into it, and can now say that I don't overtrade anymore, I stick to my daily loss limits and put a clear SL that can never be moved. It has been saving me money, but also costing me more stops. Thats why I am currently on a losing streak. So what is happening now to my trading: I get stopped out a lot, because I try to snipe the entries with (too) tight stops (because I dont want to lose more money than I can afford) or have a wrong idea/bias/setup/late entry OR I get spooked and exit the trade before my stop gets run, because I fail to believe in my trade idea sometimes (but then mostly see it working out just fine, but without me in the market...) OR I get wicked out (turtle soup) and then see my TP getting run right after (drives me mad), or I just miss my entry by a tick. However, I am looking for advice from more expirienced traders with this post. Currently I am also going through the whole ICT mentorship. Its been a lot of great (and free) knowledge so far. I conduct my daily analysis and keep my charts quite simple (VWAP, cumulative delta, some EMA's, Volume profiles and the DOM). I know that I can do this and turn around to be consistently profitable trader, but I have some gaps in my trading that I need to overcome. Below you can find my stats since I started trading live. Thankfully I am financially in a position where I don't need to make money from trading in order to keep a roof above my head and have something to eat, but of course, making money from trading would be why im doing it.. Thank you for any help, advice, inputs... even if you need to be critizing me, so be it. I wanna move forward. Cheers and happy trading Please move my thread if this doesnt belong here. Thank you.

There's some great advice on here.
However it is also quite dense and I'm a big fan of simplicity and directness which funnily enough should be how you approach trading.
The one quote that really cut to the heart of the matter goes something like this:

" Your only job as a trader is to execute, without fail, your defined edge in the market EVERY SINGLE TIME IT OCCURS.'

That's it.
In blackjack this is simple: every time an Ace/King/Queen etc is dealt then your edge is clear and so is your execution of that edge.
Focus on this.

It seemed strange to me that you funded an acct and moved from sim when, by your own admission, you were only slightly profitable. Too soon, if that were me. Most markets are cyclical, seen pretty clearly on zoomed out daily and weekly charts. A new trader can have a good run of a few weeks and feel that he has cracked the code only to have mkt conditions change and all the previously profitable signals now become fake-outs and losers. This is when you pay the rent for some trading desk in Chicago. Personally, I learned to trade on my favorite mkt /TF (now RTY) and traded the morning daily for a year on paper. After I became a full-time trader, I still had periods when I went back to paper for weeks at a time.

The spooked, stopped, and wicked out are all symptoms of low confidence in your trade and are solved by experience in the market. This is what a year of paper trading did for me. Had to be very serious, though, following the same rules as live.