Good afternoon to all and thank you for your responses.
The reason I do not have a different job is because I was a merchant marine Officer, until July of 2020, when I decided to completely abandon my profession because of the mental pressure applied on me as an individual, for the past 10 years. Sadly, my certificate is worth equal to toilet paper outside of shipping industry and there simply is no chance I can go back to my former job. Furthermore, at my country of residence, jobs are not only rare, but with COVID, they are non existent.
I do understand, now, that the psychological strain applied indirectly to my brain because of the lack of income is tremendous, especially due to the fact that I have people depending on me. Therefore, I enter trades having a loser's attitude, instead of a neutral perspective.
I tell myself everyday, go in and fight, but then as soon as I sit on my station, I feel the burden of loss weighing on me. I started trading with 100 shares on each trade, on a cash account and I was relatively doing okay.
Then someone suggested in September I sign up for that Tim Sykes course (it was the stupidest 80 dollars I spent in my life).
I continued by signing up with Benzinga, which is a good service, and totally worth the subscription fee, if you are profitable.
Then was the time when, being completely market illiterate, trying to become educated, I found out about The strat. So I started learning the strat, and when I started learning it well, or so I thought/think, stopped making profits, at all. There are people out there, who are consistently profitable with it, but I am not. It seems like I buy the setups that are ending up failing, and don't buy the ones that are working out well. I consistently pick the wrong tickers to trade. And if a setup works, as soon as it goes positive, I have a surge of heart beats and the urge to press the sell button. It wasnt long ago, for example when I bought a stock called ALNY at $134 (01/07/2021), held on to it for 1.5 hours, it went against me for a dollar more or less, then it went marginally positive and I sold it, afraid that it might reverse again and causing a loss. And watched it skyrocketing for the weeks ahead, and I have had at least 20 similar trades.
Even today, I traded HYLN when it went above the previous week's high, put my SL at the bottom of the previous 15 minute candle, the stock somehow didnt continue higher but instead continued sideways-downwards, and when the new 15 minute Time Frame opened, I changed my Stop loss to the bottom of my previous 15 minute candle. I got stopped out, and the lowest point the price ever went was 2 cents above my former Stop Loss, only to continue more than 1.5 dollars above my entry price.
Also, when I signed up for IBKR I exchanged my Euro to Dollars, and then after November the Dollar started decaying a lot, which I did not notice, and by December, I lost over 600 euro from that decay. I changed to a margin account when I had an equity of more than $25000 and ended up with 750 euro of total profit (all of which were made in the first 1.5 months of trading). So currently, taking into account all the money I invested and the subscriptions I paid for to have an edge in the market, I am at the starting point, with the only thing different being the total abscence of self confidence.
I do not know, if there is a recipe to improve, and come back from that hole I currently regard myself being in, but I surely would love to. I just don't think, that I will ever be able to make this work for me at this point and I do not want to have false hopes. I thought I had somehow a good level of intelligence, but recently, I doubt it.
Obviously not a gun shot, takes a lot of practise and huge amount of wasted ammo to get good.
