Marketgeometry

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Should I really be doing this???

Today I felt like the market was handing me fistfuls of money and I kept saying no thanks. I have so many great setups and a lot of them would work out just fine. I place orders and then pull them. I place orders, get filled, then take a two second profit. I place orders, get filled, place stop, feel a baby amount of heat, and get out. And a lot of question of what I saw.
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I have a couple of setups. See the setup and not place the order. Then I would rush to place a non-system order and screw it up.
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I have a couple of very successful traders from time to time giving me great ideas. It seems like 80-90 percent of them work. Do I take any of them, seldom and the ones I take I seem to mess up out of fear or greed.
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Why am I so afraid of losing?? I know if I got a couple of good days under my belt - I think I would loosen up. This is a dream of a lifetime for me and I can't get myself to take a decent swing at it.
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I should be making good money but I lack confidence. One trader said once I got that confidence, I will trade like a rabid dog.
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Today, I missed the Big Mouth stocks. MT gave me a great trade to short FSLR. I took it and screwed it up with a trailing stop too clse. I felt like the market was going to fail and was looking to short any rallies. I thought I had a great trade in APD only to find I did not push the entry bottom after my bathroom stop (see charts below). I called a couple of tops to other traders without taking them myself.
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Today I feel with out too much effort, the way I looked at things, I should have made $3000 to $5000 today. I banner day. Instead, I have my head up my ass and lost $110.
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I you live somewhere in Central New Jersey, and you want to yell at me during the market day, please come by. I need someone I think to be next to me. I would state my case for a trade including the stop loss and profit target and reasons for moving the stop or getting out of the trade. You would say place the trade including the stop. And then if I come near touching the key for any reason other than the ones I spoke of - you break my fingers with a hammer. This is the only way it seems I would be successful.
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This is bad really bad. When the bell rang at the end of today - I just broke down and cried. The only saving grace I take out of this - with all my mistakes today - I only lost $110. This gives me the means to totally frustrate myself again tomorrow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi, denarii i am following your blog a few months and maybe you can use these 2 tricks.

Use lager time frame to reduce noise.
Fix your maximun dayly loss. pe 20$, take it as lost, and place your trade according to your sistem. Play with "other" money. Yours is already lost.
That helped me a lot. I was in an awful fear of lossing.

Anything-Goes said...

Couple of things I would mention to you that seem to work wonders for me, you may already have in place, are Pivot points. There are many diffrent calculators out there but I use this and it has been great for the past few months.. few days there are no pivots on intraday, take a break. Look for days with wide pivots for big moves.
Here's the link, add in the values and draw out lines on ur intraday before the day starts.

- http://www.price-trend.com/pivitz.htm
- Use moving averages, 12 and 20 EMA and look back at previous days to see how the price action takes a breaker and bounces off the MA's and get in the trend.
- I love how you use the wave, you showed me today which is great.. I will be learning that too soon as I want more trading oppurtunities.
- Last but not least, keep the indicators to the minimum, use stochastic and a momentum indicator(only for divergence/covergence) and maybe a few more like MACDA but don't use standard settings, they suck.
If you have the confidence that you can make 5k-10k then you have what it takes to trade. I get scared very often like today I should've taken the short at 13:50 I called but I was scared.. it's okay to be scared but now I know that if I see a similar setup anytime in next few months I would be able to take advantage of it cuz I have seen it work once. More then being confident or making money.. you have to have faith in your entry/exit points or trading method.. if you don't your entry for one minute then don't take it and let it go in or against you. Right there you will learn why you should've entered and if u were in the trade and took a loss you'd think of the loss more then what happened. I have been there .. cried, sat down on weekends staring at screen.. covered my losses by working part-time cuz I always wanted steady money that I could USE for myself.. in futures, it comes 1 day and the next day you may lose it all. I wait atleast 2 weeks before I claim the money then trade very carefully. If you have any question let me know and I know that you have 10x times more experience then me and I would be glad if you can also help me out from time to time. Your dedication and tolerance has kept you in the 5% of the successful traders and they make it big ultimately.

ainkurn said...

Denarii, sorry to see you had a bad day. If I didn't live in BFE, I would gladly stop by and "break your fingers with a hammer". Seriously though, having someone there can be very beneficial but it can also be hurtful. My brother was the partial cause of me missing a 6-8k trade in FSLR last week but he made up for some of it today by supporting me shorting 500 shares of FSLR today pulling out $1,800.

We all have those days when we see opportunities and huge potential profits but are slow to take the signals. I would recommend taking a few days, cutting your size and taking every single setup you see. this will keep your risk low while building your confidence. then analyze your trades, weed out bad setups and increase your size back to normal. Confidence is king.