Trader X

There was something I forgot...I need to watch my trades after the fact for at least 3 time periods in the future and see what the outcome would have been if I had followed my planned trade rather than moving stop or exiting too soon.

One other thought about non plan trades. The pain of not being in was greater then the fear of losing.

Trader X

Did I make money today..... yes. Have I made money or scratch even all week... Yes. Is that why today was a great day... No! It was because I figured out a major reason for my equity curve issues. After tracking this weeks trades at the Smart Trade Pro trading bootcamp I quickly realized that one: I need to really go back and track more trades and two: that I am exiting my trades too quickly by 2 different means.

The first way is by simply moving my stops way toooooo quickly. The second way is by just exiting when I get nervous from a small retracement.

I am only trading one contract and I am trading scared.... not as scared as I used to mind you but still scared. The one thing I am doing right is I am much more diligent about my 3:1 payoffs. That has been the main reason why I have not blown up in the last 6 months.

These issues are very common.... way to common for us traders. I fact they may be the largest reasons why most traders fail. Most traders don't even know they have those issues. At least I know.

How do I fix this. I am changing my beliefs about how to trade better. It's not by taking off too soon in an effort to capture gains too soon. It's by letting my winners run to my 3:1 payoff and not trailing too closely or by just taking it off too soon.

Constant diligence is where it's at. Looking at my numbers or swing hi/lo pivots and keeping to my planned trades.

The other possibility is to appease my psychological issues by trading 2 contracts and using one as a hurry up contract. There are a couple of issues with this. You have to back test each contract as a separate trading system and get a SQN for both... The sacrificial contract trade and the plan trade. Only by tracking the performance or lack of it will I be able to completely change my beliefs regarding that style of trading.

Trader X

I was just looking at a couple of things. One was my performance over the last 6 months. I am not a losing trader anymore. I am very excited about that but it has taken 5 years for me to stop losing. I remember fondly a seminar I went to back in Dec of 2004 with Mark Cook. I remember his saying to the group that it took him 5 years to stop losing and I remember myself thinking that there was no way it would take me that long! How funny is that? I thought that I was going to just pick this up and this was going to be an easy thing and now 5 years later I see i did all the things the said we would do because none of us would listen to him. I didn't because I thought I was special and didn't need to. I thought I was better. Boy was I wrong. I should have listened but I didn't.

Mark, if your out there reading this ( I know your not) but if you are I want to officially apologize for thinking that I would never do all the things that you did and told us we would if we didn't listen. I didn't listen and I did them all.

Trader X

Today was a pretty good day for a trend day. I learned something about reversion to the mean trading. I need to stay away from trend days. I got back to BE, but it was hard.

2 things. One, dbl tops and bottoms are my thing. And I learned today that when you enter you can then set stops tightly because by the nature of the pattern if it breaks then it wasn't the pattern. Good stuff

The other thing was that I really struggled to get back to BE and my last trade was designed solely to get back to BE. That was a bad thing because the risk:reward wasn't there and it wasn't really a good trade. I got lucky, but I shouldn't have done that.

The market did finally crash today as I have been thinking it would. The bear market is back folks. Get short, hold on, and make money.

Trader X