what a ride! I was up $800 then down to flat then now back up to over $1K+. whoohoo!
If you are in control and plan your trades then it would be fine.
My mistake(s) was always same bad habits that have bedeviled me for years! The call of the countertrend. Over the years I have controlled to have lesser and lesser damage. But it's still lurking...
Luckily it didn't hurt me as much as in the past. Because I got out fast enough. And I was able to recover and made it all back and some.
I'm not sure what in my psychology that makes me so afraid of a supertrend. Just ride it.
I even shorted but I covered too soon. Maybe because in the past I have shorted near the bottoms and got whipsawed due to the buy-the-dip crowd. So I'm afraid/traumatized of shorting on trendy days because I'm afraid of the rip up.
Eventually I did caught that last reversal move near the close of trading day. So made back all of my losses on YM and more. But i would have made so much more money if I had kept my shorts. Much much much more!
The other mistake was that when I finally did caught that reversal I didn't hold longer. I mean I made nice comeback. Hold onto winners and cut losers. Same principle applies. holding a few more minutes while it was still zooming back up would net an additional $1K! damnit.
But the hard part is to figure when is a supertrend vs a choppy trend day.
A lot of important lessons today.
I realize that in markets, there's always another opportunity. If you missed a bus then there's always another bus to catch.
This morning I was thinking to myself it's Friday and things seem slow in my NG. I still ended up making decent money on NG. My bread and butter go to instruments. And then all of sudden a bunch of actions in the index futures NQ(which I made money) and YM(which I lost then came back).
My other mistake is look at the bid/ask instead of the chart. Just thinking the price is "low" instead of waiting for my exact reversal signal to enter. Prices are never too low to short and never too high to buy as Livermore said.
Don't give up yet... Stanley Druckenmiller said as long as you are clearheaded you can always make back your money and some. In Market Wizards, he recounted coming into Oct 1987 crash he was SUPER LONG. Then that Monday he got out of all of his longs during the bounce and shorted. So he was in the worst possible position coming into Black Monday. But by the end of Oct 1987 his fund ended up positive for the month and for the year too if I remembered correctly.
I had 3 small losses days this week and I was about to give up. But last night I told myself you've come this far. Farther than anytime in your trading in terms of consistency. In the past, I would make a lot then lose a lot. It was very erratic. Now I'm more consistently profitable. You gotta push further. Correct your mistakes. Identify good opportunities. Etc.
But I'm not optimizing the opportunities available. On a day like this I should have been killing it! I'm sure some of you killed it!
Next time...
