Post Your Bitter Day Trading Lessons Here!

[comagnum]

PDT is 4 round trips within 5 business days. I see this often, people that think PDT is 3 round trips, it used to be back in the day.

FINRA rules define a “pattern day trader” as any customer who executes four or more “day trades” within five business days.

https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answerspatterndaytraderhtm.html

 

[GrowleyMonster]

IB will prevent you from making that fourth trade. I guess they don't have to do that, but if they let you make a fourth trade, then they have to freeze your account for 90 days after you do so. At least that's my take on it.

 

[GrowleyMonster]

Bitter lesson number 2. Live the life, 24/7. You don't have time off if you want to trade. Heard on the news about this new fake hamburger that is getting some airtime in restaurants. I'm like, Yeah. Right. Me being a devoted carnivore probably descended from tyrannosauruses, I totally dismissed it as non-news. Until I looked at my top movers screener. BYND. 41% change today. ANYTHING in the news could be a fundamental catalyst for something or another. It's all potentially price moving. Of course I would have seen it if I had paid a bit more attention to my screener or read the journal this morning....

 

[GrowleyMonster]

Bitter lesson #3. Not so bitter, actually, since it really came home to me in paper trading. Don't move your stop down, period, and don't move it up too early, either. I was falling into a bad habit of sometimes nudging my stop down because I wanted to stay in the trade. That has cost me a lot, in live trading, too. The stop is there for a reason. Moving it down to keep from getting stopped out is defeating the purpose, and violating the trade plan. Injecting emotion into the trade. Since I stopped doing that I can see a small but definite improvement. Better to get stopped out a bit early than a lot late. An intelligently placed stop is not going to cost me hardly anything. It will save me a lot of bucks.