I usually don't comment in journals, but I want to point something out to you about something I learned that I didn't know about when I first started trading.
You need to look at the distribution of returns for your asset class for the time period you are trading. You should become familiar with the mean-scaling laws for returns. If you assume that the returns are normally distributed, then you should have a guide in terms of what the movement should be +/- one standard deviation.
Let me give you an example. If the average return is 5% on a 60min bar, +/- 2% [at one standard deviation], you have returns between 3% and 7%, 68% of the time. So if you are holding that stock on a short term trade past what its historical behavior has been hoping for a 9%, you need a good reason. These returns will also scale depending on the time bar you use.
I'm not saying this is a bullet-proof system, and you will kick yourself a few times when the stock moves, but let me just say that if you are trading RSI intraday and are holding, expecting a massive move of $5 in a 5 minute period when the stock rarely if ever moves that much, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You need to be armed mentally with the knowledge of how the stock moves to avoid holding a loser too long and not capping a winner soon enough. Having a mathematical picture will help you overcome these obstacles. Historical or windowed-historical distribution of price moves should be the first thing you have in your mind.
You should calculate what the average returns are over a basic, small time window. This will give you a general idea of what to expect while trading. Let me also state that when a stock is not trading in a +/- one sigma type range, you WILL know by the force and intensity of the move [it will usually be news driven.]
I'm telling you this because I used to pseudo-market make the same stocks every day. It took me 2 years to realize that the problems I had with letting my profits run and cutting my losses had a lot to do with this underlying mathematical description of how the stock actually moves.