Quote from bandit77:
you should stop and take a breather. the biggest mistake I see is that you seem to have started as a intraday trader and have justified holding losses overnight. with CPI coming out the next morning, that's asking for trouble. take the advice of paper trading for a while. live fire makes people do things they otherwise may consider risky. with something like CPI or Fed announcement, I find it much less risky to take on a position AFTER the number came out. if you have a position going in, you have no edge and it would be similar to gambling.
your position sizing may need some work. why take on 300 QQQQ's if you're tweaking your system. 10 or even 1 QQQQ will be enough to see how your plan works out.
if you go below 25k, you lose day trading rights. then someone will probably say, hey, try futures. no 25k requirements there! then you'll probably start trading 1 contract. lose some money. then try to make it back by doubling up. then it's down hill from there.
or vice versa, if you stick with equities, you lose day trading privileges. so you get 3 trades every 3 days iirc. then you justify yourself into a swing trader. hold positions overnight. double up on Q's to make back your money. etc etc.
take advantage of tradestation. backtest your ideas. since you're basing it on moving average, it should be easy enough to program into easylanguage. even if easylanguage programming is a pain and takes time to figure out, and even if you don't ever make heads or tails in EL programming, at least the time wasted will SLOW YOU DOWN. which may save you some losses.
read up on some methodology. plenty of people you can pay for it. or just try to pick up what you can here or there. do anything to keep you distracted from losing money. until you get close to 50% winners. right now, if you're losing money every day, it may be better to tone everything down.
