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
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ReplyDeleteyup,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.
ReplyDeleteI 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,
ReplyDeleteYeah 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