Discretionary Equity Trading Journal

I am extremely happy with my execution today. I got a great entry on UA early in the morning when it showed me some strength. I did a great job bidding into it with size with a clearly defined risk reward that enabled me to take on a lot of size. That put me up significantly for the day when I caught most of the morning pop. I then was disciplined enough to wait for it to come in and hold and show me a defined level where I could get big again. Since, I was up a lot for the day with a well-defined risk, I put on good size again and carried it through the high. I could have made money trading some other stocks on my screen as well, but I felt this one was in play and wanted to really focus on it.

$4,500 Net
 
Realized looking through my thread that I have been focused too much on profits and not enough on the key factors for long-term success. As a result, I decided, I will reduce my size dramatically, and focus not on making a 1K or more a day, but on executing every trade I see in all of my stocks. My goal for this is two-fold. First, I really want to stop feeling so much of an emotional investment in each trade. If I have only 1 or 2 trades on at a time, which are using my entire buying power, despite my profitability percentages and past success, it is not emotionally healthy, and will create greater P&L swings in either direction. I would rather average 500 a day with small losing days and be positive almost every day then average 1000 a day with regular big losing days and a big standard deviation in P&L. The first situation is always scaleable up to take bigger risks as my ability to manage multiple trades at a time without as great of an emotional spike. For me, the proper test in position sizing is whether or not the size is large enough to make me uncomfortable. I have been trading uncomfortably for awhile now, and even though I have had good success, I want to dial it back so I can focus on making technical improvements to myself as a trader that will last a trading career.

Friday was up 1000 or so and today was up 1000 or so, but had a real close call to maxing out my loss limit before I finally caught a long in Z that made back my losses.
 
Today was a fantastic day in terms of executing on my plan. Trading smaller definitely allowed me to be less emotionally attached with each trade and take trades that made sense without overanalyzing them. I significantly reduced my trading size, but I put on more trades on more stocks and caught some nice moves. CAT both long and short. UPS caught a short. Got two really nice shorts on EMN and ETN. Took a small loss on DRI in the morning and wanted to get long mid day, but was involved in a few other positions that were working for me so I passed on the idea. This was the only negative for the day, in that I had a trade that I felt like was a good idea and I passed on it.

Considering my trade size was extremely small today, I am very happy with still pulling out a $1000 day
 
You mentioned you have a max loss for the day, does this also apply to profitable days? Do you shut down at a certain dollar value or is your main goal to trade well until close. How about targets? Do you scale out in relation to what you risk, try and ride it as long as you can, sup/res (daily chart), or wait for price to show other wise? Do you calculate cents per share?
As a discretionary trader as well, this is what I most struggle with. I can be up X amount after an hour of trading and decide to shut down on good profits. Only to give it all back and worse the next day after a string of small losses. Unfortunately this leads to deciding to put a full day of trading in to make it back, which sometimes leads to more losses wiping out my weeks profit. This is where a max loss for the day is good. I have hard time trading the entire day if I am up a fair bit after morning session because I don't want to give it back but those can be days where I have a monster day. Do you plan on trading 6.5 hours everyday, how do you pick and chose?
Is your max loss for the day calculated at all by your average winning days or is it just a psychological number that allows wiggle room for draw down without putting you on tilt?
Sorry for the all the questions, you don't need to answer them all, just picking your brain. Great journal and nice trading.
 
What platform do you currently use? How many stocks do you follow? Do you currently trade the same stocks every day or use some sort of filter to look for good trading opportunities.
 
Had a very good day on executions and sticking to my plan on Monday, but was off yesterday. Had another very good day in terms of executions today. Made a great short in CTSH, but got squeezed for a loss, but reentered and made a nice trade. Also, got long and caught a nice long. TWX caught a nice short, and was able to cover and go long before the pop in the morning. Also, caught another nice short as it traded down lower. Thankful I was not caught in that wicked short squeeze price spike mid-day. WAG I caught a nice long in, but didn't carry it quite long enough since I felt uncomfortable holding a long that far on a stock that had gapped down so far for the day. I did catch a nice short when it failed to make a new high. A few small losing trades here and there, but did well to execute on multiple stocks and multiple trades, keeping my mental flexibility to change direction as the stocks and market indicated. Overall, pretty happy with my performance. Always room for more improvement. Especially, in trying to hold onto my winners a little longer.
 
Agassi,

I think I might have mentioned it in one of my previous posts, but I tend to watch somewhere around 10 stocks at a time. I try to make sure that each of my stocks has potential to make significant moves that day. Therefore, I trade stocks that have been moving well lately, stocks that are in the news, etc. Sometimes, I will trade a stock for a few days, and sometimes it will be on my screen for only a day.
 
One of the areas that I am seeing the most improvement in my trading recently, which really made a difference today is patience. Patience to wait for a stock to pull back before entering. Patience in terms of holding onto trades to capture bigger moves. The smaller positions sizing has really helped me psychologically in this area, without negatively impacting my P&L. In fact, I am trading better from a consistency and P&L volatility standpoint. Caught nice shorts in EAT, TWX, and SNI. Caught nice longs in SSYS and ANN. However, I did get stopped out for a big loss in SSYS initially, because I didn't quite wait for it too pull back enough. However, I did make a really nice entry the second time around after it pulled back even more, and then carried that position through to its new breakout high and above.
 
Had a technical glitch with my computer and trading platform that ended up being quite painfully financially. I took the last few weeks off to decide how I want to proceed. I have plenty of profits set aside from which I could reload my account. However, as my account grew, I was trading more volatile stocks with larger size than I should have. Even though this worked out very well for me, emotionally I had not grown into that trading risk. As a result, I have decided to start from scratch, trading small size and building my account up gradually and slowly increasing my size in a way that I feel more emotionally comfortable with. I have done it before, so I can do it again. It should make this journey more interesting as my account value is only about $8,500 now.
 
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