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Journal : Trading and training the mind - Giddy Up!!!
I just joined futures.io (formerly BMT) tonight after getting into Day Trading on August 24th of this year. I wish I had joined a week ago, as this was a tough week.
The main offender was spending to much of each day in front of the screen and getting caught each afternoon making emotional trades.
Tonight, I have read some great posts about realizing how important it is to scale back and work a plan with goals for profit and for time in front of the monitor. Day trading is not the casino and not the place to work on your Ego. I have been struggling with the Ego part more than anything. Yet a good post I saw mentioned the importance of looking at trading as a business with income/expenses rather than winners and losers.
On the expense side, today was a repeat of a common mistake I have made - not using Stops.
The afternoon saw ES take 17 points when the drop began at 2:11pm est. To make matters worse I reversed my trade for another expense of 11 points.
Hard work is the plan going forward.
hope you not trading size....and are well capitalized..else markets are in the hunt mode for their lunch n beer money
game here is real simple...win a lil more than you loose...but if loosing big points...it will become tough at some point
i know there are schools of thought who do not advocate SIM...but if u trade same way real and SIM....SIM can be a great way to say you on the right side or not. Futures can be great if trading right...else the risk of giving back is far higher due to leverage and volatility
anyways thought would speak out when saw some big pt losses....which is never a welcome sight.
Thanks Paps!
I agree with you. Truthfully, I knew I should have taken a break all of last week to work on so study as I started in late August when Vol was really high. Thought I was a champ. I have much to learn.
Much time today spent reviewing material on the webinars of futures.io (formerly BMT) - focused on psychology and risk management.
I reviewed my dismal trade from 9/25 to see that the charts indicated the exit was clearly defined by some indicators point to the door. In my emotional trance I failed to review them. The crazy thing is the repeated lesson here is to have a plan and trade it. That trade had a plan that kept changing during the trade. At one point I was patting myself on the back before all support was broken...then I froze.
Back to today, I wanted to Sim trade a bit today and found it required more work to set up the platform etc and get real non - delayed data...blah blah. The picture is clear, work harder. Get prepared and look in the mirror to see the captain of this ship.
I was very anxious to get a trade in today, after watching the ES for most of the time from noon-3pm. I finally put in a trade with support in the 1870 area being tested a couple of times. Once I went long, I realized that I needed to make a bunch of other decisions. When do I get out, is this going to be a home run? Crap, where is my plan.
I saw a 3 point gain turn into a 1/2 point gain as I stumbled all over my keyboard.
Well today started out with income on the first ES trade of the day.
Followed by a series of small winners totaling 4.75 points.
The negative were 2 big expenses as Stops where hit - with an expense of 9.5 points.
To put salt in the wound, I had another 2 expensive trades entered on the wrong side of the market - expense total there was 3.5 points. These 2 trades really threw me into a tailspin. So, with emotion, I jumped into another trade with an expense attached for a total daily net result for the day of an expense of 11.25 points.
I was getting into trades too early today, without confirmation of trends, the emotions where running high as I really felt the bruised ego from early on in the day.
I am heading to Sim for 2 weeks to sort out my trading plan, goals and discipline. See you tomorrow.
Goal today was to not trade with Cash.
Accomplished.
Simulated trading with real time will be a good thing for me as the benefit of not continuing the expensive lessons of recent past. Level of stress was much lower and level of testing much higher. Less anxiousness to earn income and more listening to the market.
futures.io (formerly BMT) resources in the download area have helped. Yesterday, the video by Larry Pesavento has opened my eyes to some patterns that seem to resonate with me. As a presenter, Larry is great, he has decades of market experience as a technical trader.
Going forward, I will follow the suggestions in a futures.io (formerly BMT) webinar on Where Do I Start by, basically to trade products with smaller daily moves per contract than the ES. The euro:usd pair seems to fit the bill.
Two trades made in search of ABCD patterns on the ES were unsuccessful but trade management was improving as stops and profit targets where used.
One trade in the EURUSD was made testing the ABCD pattern. Trade management value was high. More sim is needed here to learn the leverage etc, work on pattern recognition.
In the evening I was reviewing a Pesavento book and continued to dig into his teachings. Will work again on the ABCD patter as it seems to be a bit clearer 24 hours later.
I will trade a few markets in sim today, simply looking for ABCD patterns.
Managed to continue to educate via Larry Pesavento's work on Gartley patterns. Basically, this is studying as I read one of his books. Then I am fishing a bit as I check through the charts on the computer looking for some of the patterns.
Finding these patterns is turning out to be valuable as I am learning about Fib numbers in terms of how they relate to retracements in many of the Gartley patterns. The curve is pretty steep. This experience is humbling and I am glad it is because if it was easy, everyone would be doing this.
The sim trades today where basically testing some of the ideas from the current studying. The execution is improving and risk management via stop loses. This will take some time to fine tune the entry exit points.
Was glad many experienced traders suggest trading the euro. The great thing I noticed today was the risk management available here vs the ES. Trading cash, you can choose your size and a pip can represent a small amount, much smaller than ES with the 12.50/ tick.
For education, the Euro is a good starting point.
Please stop reading anything about patterns. I know them all from A-Z, spent 100s of hours programming and trading them and it's all bullshit! Very convincing bs but you will not make money doing that. You will blow out your account. For that matter, disregard everything you have read about trading! I know this sounds crazy but you have a chance to learn this properly and if you don't cloud your head with fibbonacci numbers, harmonic price patterns, renko charts, cycle analytics, entry signals and all that crap you will be so far ahead of the game. 90% fail because they all do the same thing.
Truth be told, you need to first learn to define support and resistance and understand that price moves between these levels. S/R comes in two fashions- price points ( highs, lows, closes, swing high/low, etc) and volume at price. Learn this before anything. Once you have "framed" where price may travel you can work on building context by looking at price action relative to S/R.
That is a start for you that will save you more than you believe- One day you will appreciate this post- ask any experienced trader on here and they will tell you the same.
Edit- check ou this link for an idea of what I'm talking about- every morning I discuss S/R levels premarket in a very simple way.
Looks like more poor economic data out. This time the market did not shrug it off. All the sudden "No Rate Hike" is starting to make sense. I see some big volume traded in the mid 70s that could provide support off the volume dist chart (I …
