Keep Calm and Don't Move Your Stops.....

A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning!

The Purpose of Life is Joy!!

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

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.