First I would like to introduce myself. I have had a love hate relationship with the market for about 10 years. I have made great money and lost even more. I have traded in Futures, Currency, Penny Stocks, Options.
I am currently down around 25k in tuition I have paid over the years. Blown more than a couple accounts. Surprising how 500 here or 1k there takes over over the years.
I started like most in the world of penny stocks. Back when penny stocks were all the hype. Whats funny is I haven't heard much about them till last few months again. Must mean a market top is coming J/K.
I then went to options which cost me the most. Over leverage is a difficult thing especially when your starting to learn options at Dow 14k. The one thing i can say that si good is that i have been persistent. I would lose and study. lose and study. I used to have tons of indicators all confusing the hell outta me. Then about a year ago I realized my business I owned would now be going on much longer. It was a family business and was around for 40+ years. Circumstances I could not control ended with me me shutting the doors to a family business not more than a year after my fathers passing.
I was fortunate that during a hard time in my life i was ok financially and could make it by. I have a couple of rentals that basically make my life break even. But I started to wear through saving at a slow grind. Going back to work for someone after 10 years of working for myself was hard to swallow. I started to trade again but this time on paper. I subscribed to costly data feeds to get the data a felt i needed to do the job correctly. Analyzed Monte Carlo simulations to try to figure things out better. Then I paper traded for 8 months futures. I am kinda an excel wizard to a point so i will post some spreadsheets i built and also use it to analyze allot of my tick data. I am now pretty much a student of Delta and volume analysis.
I have come a long way in 10 years of losing and winning. I know that I am a good trader but also know it is the money managements that kill me. 2 account blow ups were from actual profitable trades a turned in to losers then refused to get out of. I have a knack for getting greedy but I hope my paper trading has helped me. I used to post allot on another forum but found chat rooms and forums very distracting to actual trading. So I won't be posting here except when I am done trading most likely.
I started futures trading 2 days ago again live. I added 1k to a 478 dollar account. I had a great trade right out of the box and was looking at 800 in gain. But I let it go all the way to a + 1 tick stop. I took a break and went outside to think about the foolishness I had just seen in myself. I then went back to the pc. took another trade and was up to 1k profit and yeah u guessed it too a 2 tick gain. I then scalped eod and closed the day +107 after fees.
Now +107 still imo felt like a good day because I am trying to make this a job not a get rich quick scheme. 107 is still 13 an hour and that is respectable to have the freedom trading allows. But I realized I needed something to help me better on stop management. I dug into my notes ect and came up with what i felt was good. Which leads me to a question for fellow traders.
I prefer at this point to move my stops and not have firm targets. Is this foolish?? Some tell me i should enter each trade mechanically and know profit targets. But i feel if i have rule based stop moving then I should be ok??
So this leads me to todays trading. I am not at home so cant post pics yet. But i took 60 screen shots so i could review the trade fully after the fact. I went long at 1191 and it went about 2 points against me if i remember right. I was ok with this from what i was seeing in volume clusters ect on 5 min chart. Long story short i kept moving my stop and monitoring the trade. at 1195 i actually moved targets to 1207. But in the end i exited at 1200. after the move to 1203 i was concerned with what i saw and it hit my determined stop then ran to 1207. I am happy that my guess …