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I was up my average winning day yesterday, and hit my stop. Got down today, fought back like a beast and got up about half my winning day, and then got wrecked. I am so furious right now I could kill, ok? But I am not going to trade.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Whelp, the market broke me yesterday. I completed the slow motion blow up by finally raging out. The market really is a magic mirror, and it created the conditions for me to finally get me what I wanted: the emotional relief of ending the pain of consecutive losing days by destroying the account. SUICIDE TRADING. You just kind of watch, glassy eyed, with this "f*ck it" feeling, as you finish yourself off.
I will say that I am grateful for these funded accounts. God only knows how much money I would light on fire if it wasn't for them. Good for them for capturing the value of my broken ego.
I'm a middle aged guy with real responsibilities, so I can't do this every day, but if I ever do it again, I will come back here and post my images.
So, as predicted, I could not stay away, but I was so pissed off that I had to reflect a bit before trying again. I'm completely convinced that the only thing standing in the way of getting everything I'm looking for out of trading is me.
I was mistaken in thinking that all I needed to do was stop the blow-up days, because there was a connection between my successful days and my propensity to blow up, and that is that I could only trade at all - seriously, I could only put on a trade at all - if I was in some sort of beserker state where risk didn't exist. I had to believe I was invincible to do anything in the markets. I don't know if I can articulate this clearly, but basically I was always on tilt, even when I was winning, if that makes sense.
I noticed, for example, when I came back, that I would start to feel a little anxious, even a little avoidant, before I opened the charts. Sometimes I would put on a trade within a minute of opening the charts, as if I needed to just jump into the madness in order to act. Then I would kind of get lucid on adrenaline or something, and be able to act, but like I said, I was already blowing up. I was already on tilt from the start.
When I started up again a few weeks ago I changed things a bit. The most important thing that I have been doing is not having "trading time" per se. It's true that for certain parts of my day I have no other major demands on my attention, but as I work all day I keep the markets up and watch. I used to have to shut down the screen to control my behavior, which, if you think about it, is pretty messed up. A typical pattern for me would: trade in the morning, underperform in some way but end the session in the green, turn off the screen to prevent myself from acting like an idiot, open the screen four hours later, jump into a trade without proper analysis, lose, blow up the day.
Now I force myself to watch all day, just keep an eye on things out of the corner of my eye. It feels like I'm desensitizing myself to the market. What's happening is that my anxiety is going from being generalized (I'm trading, therefore I'm in a low grade freak out. "Ahhh, I'm traaaddding!!!") to more particular (I'm in a trade and scratching too soon. "Whoops, I scratched too soon again, I missed that move - can't chase it, can't revenge trade it in the other direction now, that opportunity is now gone - but maybe I'll spot something later in the day."). Impulses are still definitely coming up that I need to relax away and not act on, but at times I am getting myself out of whatever finite box I was putting myself in that was squeezing my mind into beserker mode.
I passed a funding evaluation with a $6K profit target last week. Now I'm working on another one with another company while I wait for that one to get set up. I'd like to pass a couple before I trade a live account.
Unfortunately if I'm right about what was going on with me, there's no way I can keep a journal that determines whether I was on tilt based on some objective metric. Since I can be on tilt and win, it's not like as long as I don't blow up I was in the right mindset. Everything is subjective. It's all happening in my head. And I can easily lie to myself by deflecting the required self-awareness onto a quantifiable trading metric. So I'm not going to post here every day, as if that is a shortcut that will keep me from going insane. But I will update every now and again.
