I am going dark until after September opex.
I heard a story once about Mike Krzyzewski who coaches the Duke basketball team. The team suffered a heartbreaking loss in a key game, and they got back in the wee hours of the morning with the mood pretty dark. Rather than everyone heading home to dwell on the defeat, Coach Krzyzewski then had them immediately practice for hours in the middle of the night, turning the disappointment and anger of defeat into a positive force to improve upon their play, put the mistakes in the game behind them, and psychologically move forward to the next matchup. I think there is a powerful lesson there.
I have suffered a handful of painful, self-inflicted defeats the last few days by continually shorting this market, a string of defeats that simply should not have happened. I am stepping away from the game for a few days to immediately put that frustration, and motivation to never let that happen again, to work on improving my trading game. I am going to finish building my new sheets which will help improve my ability to assess potential volatility trades; revamp and better define my entry and exit criteria, and hedging considerations, for trades; define a more rigid money management system; significantly expand the list of charts (and, for a subset of those, IV surfaces) that I review daily both to observe market activity as well as identify specific trade opportunities; and design a new schedule to provide more discipline to my daily mining for opportunities and subsequent trade entries.
Thank you to all of you who have been following along and especially those who have provided what has been very helpful feedback. I hope you can join me on the next leg of this journey as well. I will leave you with the words of Michael Jordan: "I've failed many times, and that is why I succeed."
See you in a few days.
