I want to make three points about me and trading.
-
One - this blog is for me. It is my trading dairy. It has my scorecard on it. It has many charts on it of mainly my trades. I am really not trying to sell anything (you can buy a book or donate if you please). I am not trying to teach but you could learn from my mistakes. Very seldom am I trying to entertain. I do not have massive link lists or music videos or attacks on other people. This blog is really for me.
-
Two - I am a bit of a nut. I have had some events in my past where I survived things that no human being should have. I died once for a brief moment if I understand others versions of what happened. I was in a marriage for 13 years that I was basically mentally/emotionally died. Once I got out of it, I learned to be alive again. One thing I learned if you are happy "show it". If you are in love, should it. If you are pissed, show it. Why do I bring this up? When I am pissed that I made a bad trade, missed a trade or got scared out of a trade, I let the world knew about. I type about it chat rooms and tell anyone near or I just just scream while at my desk (yes it freaks my wife out). I do same in racket ball. After many games, I have no voice. There is a reason I do not. I get most of the feeling out both when I trade and play racket ball. A lot of people who play me or are a part of my trading think I am always pissed or stress out. By bitching, screaming or swearing, I calm my self down to continue to trade and play.
-
Three - maybe I am not a complete idiot with trading. After the end of trading today and posting my blog entries, I thought about my trades. It dawned on me that over the last 5 trading days, I have identified trades that could have made profits of over $10,000. Before everyone jumps and says oh the would, of could of, should of crap. While these are all trades I wrote about or placed orders for. The 10k is not saying if you pick the very low and the very high. If you did that, the trades would net you close to 16k maybe 20k. Now if you say, OK you never trade your ideas correctly. Let us say I still screw up and only capture 1/3 to 1/2 of the profits. That is still 3k to 5k in 5 days. I can live with that or I should say I could live on that. The only point left is I need to do it.
-
Now if all of what you just read you think is a lot of BS - I do not care because this is my blog and it is for me (but please donate anyway).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Denarii,
I know what you mean about ID'ing trades that could have made serious cash. I watched V make that huge climb the other day and didn't pull the trigger. Same with HOKU when it rose from $9 to $11 in one day, slowly. The thing is, I hate to lose $$$. But I'm getting better about pulling the trigger. It's just about limiting risk and picking good setups where the risk-reward is best. Good luck and keep up the blog. It's an enjoyable read, on good and bad days.
-BD
stop bitching... HAHAHA. forget about what everyone else thinks and focus on what will make you money.
Denarii,
Being unreasonably down on yourself is harmful, just as being unreasonably positive can be. I can't tell what you're doing here, but it sounds like both, ouch!
When I scan back over the VO on DT's site back to December, it looks like you lost about $200 this week and your best ever day I could find was $624 and that was back in January. Most days seem to be in the $80-200 range (either positive or negative).
I don't say this to be cruel or hurtful or to rub your nose in anything, it's just to set the playing field that I see. You're beating up on yourself for not merely matching your best day, but quadrupling it, and then repeating this for five sequential days. There must be a reason that you aren't pulling thousand dollar days and kicking yourself isn't going to figure out what that reason is. Neither will setting your goals this far ahead of yourself.
It's great to have big goals, but if you set some smaller, short-term goals to take you a small distance it'll probably be easier to achieve that moving to the majors in one day. You'll get some successes under your belt, and won't be comparing yourself to some unrealistic standard.
If these big weeks are achievable, what are the steps you'll need to achieve them? If you took every setup you will catch some big winners but will you be drowning in losers? If you hold on longer, some trades will become monster winners but a lot of little gains will vanish, so what's the net effect? Can you set some performance goals for next week like "I will only exit with stops" or "I will take every X setup even if it's just with 10 shares"?
I'm sure $10k is achievable eventually, but you need to develop new habits and the best way to do that is to force change, and keep things small.
Another thing to consider, and this is really a downer, but have you tried different niches? Brett Steenbarger discusses this issue a lot in his book, and John Foreman and others have blogged about it recently. I know it made a huge difference in my trading. It felt like a failure to give up day trading for swing trading, but my bank account is telling me different. There are other systems on other time frames and other instruments that might make things easier.
I hope it doesn't come across as kicking a guy when he's down. I'm trying to stop you from beating up yourself! Take that away, you could really fly.
Good luck, Denarii.
Post a Comment