Being inexperienced sucks

If your account size is less than $10,000 dollars you should not be trading. Let's say for example your account size is...$500. If you risk only 2% of you equity per trade (1% is more like it), then the max you can lose is $10 per trade. I currently trade gold futures, and one tic per one contract is $10. It's impossible. You have to well capitalized if you want to trade.

If you want to make 100/day, thats a 20% return daily....400% monthly...you can see where this is going. Your risk is way too much. Get out. You will never make any money.
 
Quote from Lethn:

I pretty much have a reasonably solid system going now and I know how the market works it's just a matter of making sure I don't do anything stupid with my money again.
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1. What is the most solid aspect of your system?

2. How exactly does the market work?
 
Quote from Lethn:

So I've just lost a large amount of money because I stupidly left a trade on all weekend, thankfully I've built up a small reserve stash so I should be able to get it like it was. $200 lost though, burns!
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Don't kid yourself pal. Don't think you won't get smoked when you've been trading profitably for years.

A guy in our group consistently makes 500 - 1000 per day, and lost over 33k in a few of minutes on MIL 2 weeks ago. He started trading again the next day and fell right back into his routine. He's still pissed but knows how to handle it.

Experience doesn't prevent losses. It gives you the strength to come back after taking a huge hit.
 
I'm not a big time trader compared to some, but one day I was long about 20K shares of SQNM which was trading at 6 or so, and gapped down to 3 after hours... Was instantly down 57,000$ which sucked, but I managed to keep my wits about me and trade my way out of part of the damage the next day, only losing 37K from the trade.

The next day, I managed to get back to trading, and doing my setups... I think it is difficult to do that unless you have enough trading experience to know (believe?) that your system gives you a real edge. I had been trading for about 6 years by that time so after having thousands of trades under my belt I believed that I did.

Fast forward a few months and my account is up 500%+ last year and 111% YTD and it was just one of those unavoidable losses.

I think it is also very important to distinguish between losses that you could not control (gap down on unexpected news, dilution, etc) and losses that you should have been able to (stock moved against you but you refused to take a loss)...

I have basically eliminated the latter, but the former still rears its ugly head occasionally.

g
 
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