That's better

An odd day, I thought we might a bit of a pull back after the overnight run up and I did position short but it was right into gained support. I took that trade off with a small loser but I should have just reversed the trade.

Instead I took the pull back and it was very uncomfortable so I added to it on purpose to try to force myself to be in the moment and that made it worse. So I closed the trade for a small loss with double size.

Then with a clear head once more, re-took the trade and went to wake my daughter up. When I got back, my target of 78 ticks was filled and I looked like a hero. I fully expected that to happen but just not so fast. I was prepared to wait all morning if needed to let price work itself to that level.

I had seen the gap on the daily chart, and we were not that far away so I elected to stretch a bit and see if I could put on the trade and hold it long enough to reach it.

Overall, well done other than not seeing the longs in the first place but credit is due for being able to switch bias quickly enough to take advantage of it.

The only real thing I regret is taking off the first long as it was completely valid just super uncomfortable.

Slave labor

Slaves work might work for free but at least they get room and board. I got neither today.

Head in ass day

I was having a little glitch in my platform, nothing major and I could have ignored it but I chose to try to fix it and then get tech support on the chat box whilst trading. Can you say DUMB ASS!!

The chart tells the tale. No need to make it worse by continuing.

I'm not sure why I am posting everyday. From once a month for nearly two years to every day? Hmmmm. Perhaps its the need to think out loud. Who knows. Oh well, I am learning to go with the flow and if the flow says to write, then I will write.



EDIT:

Not killing it but not losing either

Just closing the gap between mental and emotional sloppiness and disciplined thinking. That is all I want to do right now. The big dollars will come.

Inventory day but I elected to try to be strategic about it and be patient and I was for the most part.

The pics tell the story but in the end, I got around 20 ticks total. The last trade was the one I was waiting for and yet all the waiting must have gotten to me. I took the trade, closed it, took it again and then bailed too soon. It did exactly what I thought it would do. Emotional capital expended fighting the urge to be stupid. It was better today for sure but still difficult.

The first chart is 30M and it made me a bit nervous to be trading either direction but I did take a short as noted on the second chart, a 5M chart. 10 ticks.

Third chart I had an order in that did not get filled but would have worked really well.

Last chart is the trade I really wanted. I had a long bias the entire morning and it set up nearly exactly as I saw it happening in my mind. I just couldn't hold it long enough which seems silly but I think I over thought the entire morning and allowed fear to set in thinking I didn't really get it right.

Done for the day, not unhappy about the analysis part, still have a gap to close between the mental aspect and the emotional aspect of this game. Perhaps for the first time in my trading endeavor I recognize the disconnect between the two. I always thought if you get the mental piece right, the market knowledge and the technical skill right, that would fix the emotional aspect. That was wrong headed thinking for sure. I have talked about it before at length but the actual awareness of the disconnect was missing. I know its there now and I can face it head on.

Better still

Traded one lot today as it was chopping around and buyers kept coming in and I just didn't like that. I had a 2-3 break evens as I was pretty jumpy around the lack of conviction for the shorts but eventually it did break loose and I had a bit left in the tank and took a decent profit but left it well short of my ultimate target.

Lots of money left on the table today but the gap got closed a bit more.

EDIT: Price just printed my ultimate target. Just to poke me in the eye a little bit.

Better but not great

Today was emotionally trying.

I read things a lot better but execution lacked on the shorts. I think if I had left the shorts alone, by the time the longs I was expecting showed up, I would have been able to hold it better but I expended some emotional energy where it probably didn't need to be expended.

After the overnight trend up, I was expecting a pull back and a possible trading opportunity short which did present but I was trying to be very precise in my entry and I waited to long on both occasions and didn't get anything except a break even trade I won't dissect here.

The longs set up near perfect but instead of going all in and scale out like I discussed on Saturday, I decided to try to scale INTO the trade.

This worked very well but I was very uncomfortable with it for the reasons noted on Saturday but I forced myself to do it. I may or may not do this again. It was difficult emotionally.

I had a wide gap area on the 30M with 61.80 as the top of that gap. I was pretty sure that gap would be filled and that is where I set my targets for both positions.

However, as the open profit piled up and then it stalled at the bottom of that gap, I grew impatient and closed one position and held the other for the runner but honestly, my emotional capital was gone by then which I recognized and I closed the other one as well. This short supply of emotional capital is/was the result of 1. The long draw down period; 2. The very short time since the come to Jesus meeting and 3, expending capital unnecessarily on the shorts.

The short trades were/are a result of the some of the issues I came up with in the meeting with myself last week. FOMO, greed, impatience all reared their ugly head and instead of waiting for the long I knew was coming, I wanted it all. I suppose I could had it all as well but these were not calculated trades but rather emotional ones. Always a recipe for disaster. Thankfully I knew where I wanted to be long and kept that in focus and shifted to longs as that level approached. I became much more rational and thoughtful as that trade set up for the entries.....but still had an emotional exit.

As I type, its trading at 61.73 and has for a little bit so perhaps its done for now. Who knows. (EDIT, it just printed 61.81. Fifty four ticks from my original entry long.) There is resistance on the daily chart at 62.20 and I think we might make it there today but I am done.

I executed pretty well on the long, piss poor on the shorts and while nicely profitable today I know I could have done way better. I'm not angry or disappointed, I know its but another step away from the abyss I found myself at middle of last week.

At this point in the journey, all I am interested in is daily closing the gap between where I was and where I want to be and I did that today.

Some eye opening shit

I haven't really kept stats on specific setups in a long time.

One of the things I decided to do after my come to Jesus meeting was keep some stats and see if certain setup or ideas were serving me.

I had to go back a couple of weeks and re-create these things of course but here is what I found.

Exactly 1, Uno, One, and I mean ONE set up accounted for nearly all my gains. The others were at best break even. In all honesty, the other ideas were really losers and I got lucky on a couple. I guessed right and one was a larger winner. Throw out those marginal (ok losing ideas) and suddenly even with the mental sloppiness of the last few weeks, I am profitable.

This is the issue though. Mental sloppiness and emotional overconfidence says I can make a winner out of anything and that is the real reason for the stupid ass trading over the last few weeks. I have always known those setups were marginal and for the most part avoided them but I can see very clearly now how impatience, greed, FOMO and general stupidity leads you to think over time you can make them work.

With stats clearly demonstrating the complete opposite, perhaps its time to do as Andrew Carnegie once said "if you want to be rich, focus on one thing".

The other thing I discovered was that even with really good timing, trading small and scalping doesn't really work. It works to help get your head straight but to make money you really have to let things run a bit, even with limited time available to trade, I can afford to let a winner run. However, my emotional weakness is I need to ring the cash register quickly and I hate watching open profits reverse on a pull back and so Thursday and Friday I began scaling out of a position instead of trying to scalp only or scale into a position and it has helped my PnL quite a bit. I know its not optimal mathematically but if it provides a crutch emotionally and that leads to larger profits overall, then I am good with it. Just have to keep the losers smaller than the winners and its all good. During those same 2-3 weeks using just the one set up idea, letting the winner run with a trail stop at major swings would provided more than double the all in all out scalping thing I have been doing. I have the math to prove it.

So going into next week, I will begin trading 2 lots again. One off early to "get paid" and provide the mental crutch and the other to actually make money. Its much easier for me to let it run if I made something on the trade early on. Crazy stupid I know but that's how I am wired.

Growth Is It's Own Reward

When you look inside deeply, you see things a rational person would deny was there. But looking in the mirror honestly causes growth. And that is its own reward.

Today's chart is a reflection of some incremental growth.

It's the Damnedest thing

It's this game we play. We walk a knife's edge between confidence and arrogance. One will make you rich and the other will humble your account and your ego. The difference between the two can be measured in nano meters and it takes a force of will to maintain the correct side of this double edge sword.

You can't be successful in this trading game without having supreme confidence, but the second it slips into arrogance, which incidentally can seem like confidence if you are good at lying to yourself, you will get hammered.

A few weeks ago, I was explaining to a friend how "easy" my trading had become. I showed him a set up that happened that day on my phone and how perfect it was. He was suitably impressed and I felt the internal meter tick over from confidence to arrogance. I left that encounter feeling pretty pleased with myself and my ability. It was pure arrogant bragging, it cannot be described any other way.

The next day started a losing streak that in all truth isn't really over. Yes I have had nice winning days but the losing streak started then and the consistent winning has not returned.

So I took myself to Starbucks with my journal yesterday afternoon and had a come to Jesus meeting with myself. You know this kind of meeting. Its where your boss calls you into the office and chews your ass for something you did and tells you if you don't get your shit together, he's gonna send you off to meet Jesus in the afterlife. That kind of meeting.

I hate writing with pen and paper but that is where I think the best and where I have the best break through's personally. So I committed to just sit there and think through it. And I did. So far 4 pages of stuff all related to emotional and mental sloppiness. This time though, I didn't just stop at what was wrong but how could I approach the issues in a rational and methodical way to either overcome the obstacle or figure out a work around.

I also committed to actually write each one out. Normally I take all kinds of short cuts when writing with pen and paper. My handwriting is not great and gets worse over time as I write. But this time I forced myself to write with purpose and to slow down and write in a way that I could actually read my own handwriting years later.

The process was cathartic and I may in the next few weeks detail some of what I discovered about myself (again, its the same old shit) but also the tactical ways I could work through them or around them.

On Sunday evening, I took a look at the daily chart and decided Monday would be a good day to be long. I could not shake the bias for longs and it just chopped around. Big losing day. Yesterday, I had the same bias. Be long and it was a huge long trend day right up until the moment I opened my charts and for the entire time I had available for trading it was short but I was long. Yesterday was a disaster day. Two in a row. This is what finally prompted the come to Jesus meeting. Two big losers in a row after 2-3 weeks of inconsistent results.

Today is a different story. I got up late and used one of the processes I wrote down to decided if I wanted to trade and in what direction, I normally don't trade prior to inventory but the set up looked pretty good so I took it and it worked perfectly. One and done today. My smallest size due to the recent inconsistency and I will stay small for at least a few more days but today felt different, like I was much more in control of my mental and emotional state. It feels more like the way I felt before the bragging event.

Chart tells the tale.