I've decided to start this journal for purely selfish reasons as I hope it will help with my progression as a trader, although I also hope others can learn from my mistakes.
I've been trading intraday for a year and during this time have learned A LOT, mostly from the many mistakes I have made.
Prior to starting this day trading adventure, I traded over longer horizons for more than a decade, but have discovered that intraday trading is an entirely different beast.
I currently trade 3 different setups - 2 that are with momentum/trend and 1 that is mean reversion. The setups tend to produce less than 5 trades per day.
My setups work well for my and my results with them have been strong. However, I suffer from a severe case of deviating from my setups and over trading, primarily in the form of chasing big moves that haven't retraced, presumably in search of easy money or possibly boredom-driven. I also tend to trade between 11:15am and 1:45pm and after 3:45pm (Eastern) and I know from my analysis that these are losing time periods for me.
Inevitably at the end of the week when I review my trades, I am up nicely on the trades with the proper setups and have given back much of my gains on the deviations.
I hope that I can progress past these psychological issues and move on with the next lesson.
In a future post when I have more time, I will go over my specific experience, goals for 2011, more reasons behind starting this journal and an outline of my trading setups.
Beginning tomorrow, I will be posting my trades as soon as I enter them. My understanding is there may be some delays on the initial posts since I am a new user and then the posts will become real time after a few days.
I will also try to post charts with my entry and exit points at the end of each day as time permits and a brief explanation and analysis of my thought process so I can refer back at a later date.
I've been trading intraday for a year and during this time have learned A LOT, mostly from the many mistakes I have made.
Prior to starting this day trading adventure, I traded over longer horizons for more than a decade, but have discovered that intraday trading is an entirely different beast.
I currently trade 3 different setups - 2 that are with momentum/trend and 1 that is mean reversion. The setups tend to produce less than 5 trades per day.
My setups work well for my and my results with them have been strong. However, I suffer from a severe case of deviating from my setups and over trading, primarily in the form of chasing big moves that haven't retraced, presumably in search of easy money or possibly boredom-driven. I also tend to trade between 11:15am and 1:45pm and after 3:45pm (Eastern) and I know from my analysis that these are losing time periods for me.
Inevitably at the end of the week when I review my trades, I am up nicely on the trades with the proper setups and have given back much of my gains on the deviations.
I hope that I can progress past these psychological issues and move on with the next lesson.
In a future post when I have more time, I will go over my specific experience, goals for 2011, more reasons behind starting this journal and an outline of my trading setups.
Beginning tomorrow, I will be posting my trades as soon as I enter them. My understanding is there may be some delays on the initial posts since I am a new user and then the posts will become real time after a few days.
I will also try to post charts with my entry and exit points at the end of each day as time permits and a brief explanation and analysis of my thought process so I can refer back at a later date.
