Maintaining Self Discipline

Practice Demo account trading the first 35 min of open: -3 ticks
Main Demo Account: After losing some, rather than quitting for the day, I decided to try things to see if I could "conquer" getting stopped out. Nothing worked. At one point I thought about switching to a different account, since this one is suppose to be my carefully traded account, but decided not to because I somehow believed what I was trying might work. It didn't. At least, not yet. I do think it might be something that could work really well, though, so I'll explain it.

For quite a bit of today I was getting stopped of trades that usually work for me. Since I know that many times my good trades hardly retrace at all and could have had a tighter stop loss, I tried trading with 2 contracts using a 5 tick stop loss and targets of 5 and 10 ticks, adjusting them as seemed right. Well, it seemed to work sometimes. Then I got the "bright" idea that if I could just always trade like this and follow price up and down the chart, I could make back the losses. Well, that lead to taking trades all over the place. Because I was "practicing" and feeling like this was teaching me how to manage the trades, I continued. But really, it undid something I've been trying so hard to get better at: waiting for the best trades and learning to wait for the trade to play out without closing too fast. What I think might work in the future is to find which trades worked best with this, and use it sometimes. The logic of it makes sense: most of my trades will get to 5 ticks profit. If I can capture that, and move the 2nd stop loss to -4 tics, I'd be down by only $5 if the 2nd contract loses. It gives a total risk of -$60, a likely risk of -$5, and a very good chance to make $65 or catch a longer lasting trend. It helps to be able to get in to a trade with high potential and little risk. One downside to using this is that with my personality, I will, as I did today, struggle with the temptation to take too many low probability entries for a "chance" to make $. But, I think with some more chart time, I'll understand when this works and when it doesn't, and learn to trade it carefully too.
 
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Emotionally I can't take the pressure of "experimenting" in my Main Demo Account. I need at least one account to be doing well in, so that I have hope that I can eventually make trading work. I need to only alllow experimenting with stop losses and profit targets and entries in another demo account or just by studying old charts. So one rule to work at following is to only carefully trade my tested plan in the Main Demo Account. What I should have done today is stop trading after my losses...I had a rule for maximum of 5 losses but I am going to change that to 3. For now it wil be 3 or the $ amount equivalent to 3 two contract trades fully stopped out. I'll stick with 2 contracts, 10 sl 10 tp 20+ tp and allow for adjusting except not to increase the SL. My focus needs to be on finding just the best trade set ups, and not worrying about anything else. I can always write down my ideas for changes and experiments later. My only hope is to become very methodical and consistently accurate.
 
I hate writing this, but I didn't trade well again today either. I know my system works because at the end of the day I can find where is would help with good entries. Is the problem that I'm not following it or is it that the signals aren't that clear in real time? I'll go through my trades again from the last couple days and count how many were stopped out yet in the right direction, and how many were taken wrong due to not reading my system correctly, how many were wrong because I clearly went against the rules and how many worked that were right and maybe this: how many were wrong because I didn't wait but just wanted to get into a moving candle? You know what...I'll total them up, and then post on here the percentage for each category.
 
Here's some results from a good portion of my trades. Takes a while to categorize them, so I didn't get through all of them.

Only full stop outs for both contracts were evaluated. If a trade made 10 ticks for the first target, I didn't include it here. Some trades had more than one problem so the percentages add up to more than 100%.

1.) 75% were not technically correct entries based on having all of my signals aligned.
2.) 12% needed a 20 tick stop loss to have made only 20 ticks potential, the rest would have been stopped out with either needing a much larger stop loss to make at least a 1:1 r:r or they were completely wrong about the direction.
3.) 25% I thought I was following the signals to my system, yet read them incorrectly. There are multiple signals....so at times signals contradict each other. This is something I can work on and clarify what to do when there are conflicting rules.
4.) 37% I decided to trade directly against my signal system, thinking I knew better. (Clearly MY error).
5.) 25% the trades were taken in alignment with the signals but either the signals came too late to take a good entry, so I was buying at a high or selling at a low, or I missed the precise entry due to fast moving price. When looking these trades over, it seemed like this could also be improved on with formulating some better guidelines to my system.
6.) 0% deliberately did not follow rules to jump into a fast moving market. This is similar to #4, but different in that those trades were based on trying to catch a trend change too early, before momentum started. This shows I can learn :) ....this used to be something I struggled with.

Summary:

Surprisingly, increasing the stop loss size would not have increased the profit potential in most of the trades. What should help is being careful to only trade my system when the signals are very clear and all aligned and being careful not to enter late, even if that's when the signals finally align.

I took a look at my best trades from today. There were 5 of them...another reason to limit how many trades I take. Only one needed a larger stop loss of 20 ticks, I ended up re-entering to get the trade. There were some similar things about all of them that I can focus on for only taking trades with that "look." However, I found other places that looked about the same where a trade wouldn't have worked. I'll need to spend some time and see if I can find something that makes the difference from it working versus not working. The good thing is, I think I found a "look" that can help with getting a nice trade. I hope so anyhow, how many times have I written on here that I thought I had something figured out, and yet I still can't seemed to be profitable? And since I only checked today's trades, it could be that other days don't have that same "look." I'll have to check.
 
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So the "look" I noticed that worked today wasn't reliable on other days. But in reviewing the trades I was reminded that simply using the 5 min chart to find entries seems like the best filter. I usually do this and somehow keep getting away from it. So, some changes to my plan for tomorrow: Go back to watching the 5 min for signals then try to enter on a lower timeframe. Trade with only 1 contract set to 10 tick stop loss and 80 ticks TP. With 2 contracts the losses add up quickly. Even though 10 ticks first target are great for getting a breakeven trade with a lot of potential, it backfires if your winrate is low. Even with a low winrate, if I could learn to get a few good trades that made a lot I would be profitable. Besides, I need more practice with trailing trades that are in profit, so it will be good for me to try this and see how it goes. I'll give myself the option of closing out the trade whenever I want, but the goal is to trail it and see what happens. And I'm changing the amount of losses per day....I'm gonna go with 2 attempts per trade set up I find on the 5 min chart. That should limit the trades and yet give me the practice I need.
 
Feels like I'm making progress, even though it's very slow. Used 1 contract with 10 ticks stop loss and trailed profits for both demo accounts. The Practice Demo Account for trading the open made $195 and I think I traded it well (that's the most important part.)

The Main Demo Account needs some explanation. From 8:40 to 9:10 CT I didn't take anything except losses and a maximum of 1 tick profit because I wanted to trail the profits. Well, I guess keeping a 1 tick profit isn't exactly trailing. I added up the amount the trades went into profit shown on the trade log and the ones that went more than 10 ticks added up to $85 more than the losses (for this 30 minute period). The largest trade went to 42 ticks but I only took $5 profit. So, it showed that I was setting myself up for a lot of losses by not closing out trades in profit.

For the time from 9:10 to 12:05 CT the Main Demo Account made $70 in profit. I did a better job trailing the profits. One trade had a maximum gain of $290 that was closed for only $145 and another trade went to $100 but I took a $30 loss. However, I didn't do well with identifying good entries. My win rate was only 37%.

I've been thinking about trying 10 sl and 20 tp and allowing the stop loss and profit target to be adjustable. I think this might be more profitable than only using 10 sl and 10 tp with no adjusting. By increasing the profit target to 20 ticks I will only need a 40% winrate, if no adjustements are made, to be at breakeven after factoring in fees. Also, allowing the stop loss to be adjusted tighter or take profits less that 20 ticks should help filter out trades that don't go the way I thought they would. I had a pretty consistent winrate of 50% using 10 sl and 10 tp without allowing adjustments. I think by making these changes, I should be able to be profitable, consistently. Guess next week will reveal that. Another benefit to sticking to 10 sl and 20 tp is that it should help me to focus on entry accuracy rather than wanting to be in a runner to undo all my losses. Sometimes I also get the mentality that it's OK to take a lot of 10 tick losses if I get a runner, and that's something I want to overcome, not enable.
 

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Finally ended positive for the day in both accounts!

Practice Demo Account trading the first 15 min of the open: $280 The winning trades were good entries, the losing trades weren't taken well. 4 winners and 3 losers.

Main Demo Account: $25 Felt really biased to take only long trades since earlier in the morning. No matter how much price dropped, I couldn't shake my bias, so I tried really hard to wait for a good long entry but jumped in a little too early 3 times before catching 2 winning trades. With both winning trades I was more concerned about making up the losses and not adding to them, so they were closed earlier than normally I would have closed them. In the case of the 2nd trade, it would have been stopped out shortly after I closed it anyhow, so I'm glad I got a few ticks of profit in there.
 

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Was thinking about my trades and wondered how far my 2 best entries would have gone and found that one trade in the Practice Demo Account could have gone to 169 ticks while keeping a 10 tick stop loss and the other trade, which was shown in the chart above went to 291 ticks and also had a 10 tick stop loss.

I think I may dedicate the rest of this journal to figuring out how to capture as much potential of each trade as I can. 2 trades with that much potential out of 12 trades total for the day. Just trying to wrap my mind around that. I may need to go back to trading 2 contracts.
 
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