-72 gross
That was a very frustrating day for me. And I sadly let my frustrations affect my trading. Just like yesterday, I let paying attention to my P/L drive my trading decisions. It was the first day of the month and I wanted to start off great. I took a loss on my first trade by getting ticked out at the low of the day only to see the stock shoot to new highs. My overtrading demon emerged and I took too many trades and forced ideas.
September Review:
September was a month of bad times, good times, and a poor finish. It started off horribly with 7 of the first nine trading days being losers. The culprit was my overtrading weakness. I was taking too many unplanned trades on the spur of the moment. In the middle of the month, I instigated a rule that I could only take trades that were pre-planned the night before. This immediately had a positive result as I won 8 of the next 9 trading days.
Things were going well until the last day of the month. This is where emotions crept in and threw a wrench in my trading. I badly wanted to be positive for the month. During my good streak, I wasn't quite able to recover all of my losses from beginning of the month. On the last day, I knew that if I had a decent day that I would be positive for the month and would have recovered from the horrible streak I had. This idea drove my trading forcing me to search for any reason to get into a trade. Add in that it was a large gap down day, days of which are usually not good days for me, and it was a recipe for disaster. I was stopped out at my max loss for the day.
The positives for the month are that I did have that good streak right after a terrible streak. During all down days and bad streaks, I was always able to stick to my risk limits. Never did I go over my max loss per day. If things went too sour, I shut it down and came back the next day. As long as I control my losses, I'll be in the game long enough for good things to happen.
The one thing saving me so far is my ability to control my losses. Obviously, I'm not a great trader, but I can limit the bleeding when I get cut. This month, my main focus will be to trading less and waiting for my prime trade setups.
Sep:
P/L: -$178.25
Win%: 34.25
Avg Win/Avg Loss: 1.53
My win percentage was around 25% the first half of the month and close to 50% the second half excluding the last day of the month. This month was when I decided to risk a little more on each trade in an attempt to get some larger winners. Unfortunately, I never got those big winners I was looking for. The larger losses dropped my avg win/loss ratio. Last month it was 2.62.
Looking forward to October, I need to trade less by only taking high quality setups with good risk reward ratios. I need to stick to my plan without having emotions linked to P/L and just let the chips fall how they may.
