When I first started trading, all I thought about where setups. Find the perfect entry and you would be a gazillionare.
Look at all the beautiful entries I took this morning. I took every single one of them - perfectly entered. Unfortunately, less than half were exited at the correct time. Out of those 6 trades I held 5 of them too long.
Um helloooooo! You are not Dennis Richard. You are a freaking scalper. You need to be a ninja. Undetected and unsuspected.
So here's the damage -4.5 pips out of a total possible of +25. Seriously? Yeah seriously. WTF!
Here is my mantra for tomorrow: You are a Ninja; if you are up +6 pips you will take the freaking trade off the table if it ever retraces to +3. Always, I don't care about excuses! Also if you don't see volume expanding in your direction just get out immediately.
LT
Posts
The Psychology of Handling Large Drawdowns
6 days ago
3 comments:
yup,LT, it's a scalper's market. If you can stomach a deep retracement, and are very accurate in guessing where market ends up at the close ie. up or down, you can still make money daytrading. If you don't have a deep pocket, or if you're not comfortable with huge stops, your only other option is to accept scalp profits.
I did 30 RT sim trades yesterday on both ES and TF (yup, 2 charts side by side), and the best I could get from TF in a single entry was 1 point. The rest were ticks. The same for ES. Even when going definitively up/down, the movement's not smooth and if you have a tight stop, you'll get stopped out repeatedly. So the way I've played it yesterday was scratch after 1min if nothing happened, and took 7 - 35 USD profits for most of the entries, then bail. It wasn't too bad. After 30 RT in 4 hours, I had about 500 USD, and just 5 losing trades that cost me an average of 20 USD. Definitely playing it the way I played before. Still works LOL! You're right, scalping rules!
I guess after trading without a break for 10 months, I had hit the wall, and started getting so attached to my trades I can't let go of the bad ones. That's why I need a real break. Take a step back to break the vicious cycle of chasing profits to cover my losses (doesn't help that I have an elephant's memory - I remember each and every one of the blowouts from the past 3 months without having to refer to my statements!) only to lose more!
Jules,
Yeah I have to admit I like scalping. But you have to trade a lot better than I did today to make money :)
You know what the irony is? Today was easy compared to Monday and Tuesday. And I made more money on Tuesday than I did today. Go figure.
Good luck with getting back to what works for you. That's the key. Get back to what suits your strengths.
LT
Post a Comment