Quote from xdiesel123x:
Let me tell you about my strategies and how they have progressed....maybe you guys can tell me how far along I am in the training process.
considering my amzn trade and what is going on in my head before during and after the trade...how far along am I?
I've been day trading for a little over a year. I paper traded for about 6 weeks quite successfully, then began the real journey - great profits, great losses, smaller profits, bigger losses, eventual consistent small profitability that paid the bills, followed by violation of risk management rules and loss of 30% of my YTD profits in one month.
Now I'm retraining myself, adding new strategies to my arsenal and practicing above all strict adherence to my rules. My income has been nearly non-existent over the past couple months, but I had to prove that I can stick by my rules, because my trading is solid.
It's so easy, so absolutely easy, yet sticking with your rules for even a single day without fail is one of the most difficult things for me.
I've attached a chart that demonstrates my trading capability. I am CAPABLE of trading like this day in and day out, but my confidence was dented in April when I managed - after vowing never to violate basic trading rules ever again - to violate rules and wipe out 30% of my gains.
So now despite my CAPABILITY to trade really well and make a living at it, I'm working my way out of a crisis of confidence, so that I again have the ABILITY to pull it off.
What will stand between your paper trading success and live trading results will be your ability to be disciplined on EVERY trade, never violating the rules and strategies that made your paper trading so successful.
You have to be very adaptive to changing conditions and treat every single trade as completely new. NEVER let the residue of a former trade affect your management of a new trade.
Although your indicators may work great over 50% of the time, maybe even more than 80% of the time, NEVER let that influence your adherence to your rules.
Example: You trade XYZ stock for over a month because it always goes at least to price $x.xx after it pivots off S/R level $y.yy. As a result of all this success you think, why just day trade for these little profits, why not swing trade for a big move? So you put on a swing position and suddenly XYZ breaks out of that dependable range and you hold on through the drawdown, because it will absolutely come back at least to price level $x.xx; there's no fundamental reason for it to keep moving in the direction of the breakout, and days go by and it keeps moving against you until finally you exit the trade at a loss that's 10 times your max daily loss.
If someone had explained all this to me before I ever started trading I'm not sure it would've made any difference. Some things perhaps have to experienced, maybe more than once, to sink in.
At this point, I can't unequivocably say that I won't do the same thing again. I firmly believe that I'll never violate my rules again and I seem to be gravitating in that direction, but even a recovering alcoholic who's been sober for 20 years can fall off the wagon.
