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What I told myself:
Start the Combine out right. Remain calm if you don't start out on the right foot. Take breaks. Act like a professional. Trade what you see and not what you feel! You're either going to pay the price of discipline or the price of regret!
What I did:
Got chopped up on a lot of my trades with some flat out wrong trades. Ended up at -375 net after nine trades. Average loser was only :44 seconds long and anything longer that was a winner at an average of 4:55.
Best and Worse
Best: Didn't go near the loss limit like some traders do. Realized that it was a mixture of chop or not seeing the market correctly. Told myself that you can't win at every trade and walked away.
Worst: Perhaps put some stops too close which ended up chopping my trades.
What I told myself:
Relax! Dont let yesterday affect you. Still time to get back those losses from yesterday
What I did:
Traded eight contracts. All were losers. Lost -580 net. Losing time was 1:25 with an average loss of -135. It seemed to just be one of those days.
Best and Worse
Best: Not much. Just didn't see the market right today.
Worst: Kept trading after I knew I wasn't seeing the market correctly.
In 7 days you are down over $1400 or $200 per day, so the chances are that if you had kept trading you would have turned a slightly positive day into a losing day.
You should attempt to focus on your strengths and weaknesses. One big one seems to be over trading.
Also if you spend the day trading, and you are breakeven before commission and admit you over traded, that is not a "not bad" day as you've said. That is a bad day and a problem that needs corrective action.
I would highly recommend you go start making more contributions to the journal that can help you. Such as why you entered and exited each trade when/where you did. Just 3-5 words per trade is enough.
Then go back every weekend and read what you've journaled. The problems should be very apparent to you if you approach it with an open mind.
Once you've identified your strengths and weaknesses, you need to formulate a game plan. Take the biggest weakness and try to very succinctly identify it. Then do the same with a corrective action plan, something short and sweet and to the point that leaves little room for ambiguity in solving the problem. Put this plan on your monitor as a post-it note.
Each day measure yourself against not how much money you made or lost, but on how well you followed your plan.
Otherwise, you are just spinning your wheels. Eventually this will lead to you changing your method, thinking the method is why you are losing money, when really you first and foremost need to solve your execution.
Welcome to the forum, @COUUUCH I believe this site has a lot to offer not only you but traders of all levels. I want to be the first to say, just think of how much money you saved by trading in the combine, I say that with complete seriousness. I'm a fan of the TST program and IMO, you're in the "right place." I don't think it is a coincidence that I picked up on the same segment of the same post as BM, I think it is a natural tendency for traders to look at past price movements on a chart and say, I would have shorted here and covered here and then I would have gotten long here and sold here. I think most of us visualize ourselves making perfect trade after perfect trade when we see past price movements that we were unable to trade, for whatever reason. Usually, the reality, when given the opportunity to trade it, is much different.
I don't believe there's a secret to the fact that you are struggling. Your decision to post the outcome of these days "hints" to (Me) the thought you might be hanging on to the end of a very small rope. If I can be blunt, what you're doing isn't working, blowing out a combine in 5 days is impressive, but we here at Big Mike's have seen it done in much less time than that! Between this forum and Big Mike's You Tube channel I'm sure you'll find what you need to get yourself safely on solid ground. There are some good people on this site and many are happy to offer suggestions (especially those oil guys), also I found the search tool quite helpful. I hope you begin to post some charts when you can, it is usually a quick way to see what a trader is "thinking."
I'm not an oil trader, but I will offer one avenue of thought you may want to consider, Anchor Something. Trading with discretion can sometimes leave me with no clear beginning or end to a trade, at the end of the day it often appears to look like random entries and exits all over the chart. But if I Anchor Something, whether it's my size, stop, entry or target I at lest have something that remains constant throughout every trade. This anchoring of something acts as the "field stone" for future and more in depth analysis of all the trades on my chart. It also gives me something to beat my head against when I find myself doing stupid stuff.
