Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Sounding like a broken record

Total gross profits:  $-50.00  -1.00 ES points
Total trades:  9  [3 scratch]
Accuracy:  33.0% 
Execution score: TBD%
Opportunity cost: $TBD

For "long time" readers, if you've paid attention, I'm sure you have recognized certain messages or themes on this blog repeated as of late -- over and over and over and over... 

Thoughts of broken records, or maybe even the movie "Ground Hog Day" may come to mind. 

OK, for today, here we go:
  • RenaTrader's Diamond Setups alerts and shorts the high of the day!
  • I mismanaged many trades!
  • I got stopped out to the tick on a trade that ended up being a big winner!
  • I got chopped up taking rogue trades!
  • I didn't take some alerts that made money, why?!?!
  • I was down almost 10 [or insert # here] ES points, and had a big end of day recovery to nearly b/e!
  • My mental game had cracks!
  • I should have had a huge EPIC day (to offset the EPIC loss yesterday)!

All of the above was true for today. 

$ES_F 5 min 02-29-2012
Well, I don't want to be a broken record.  I'm entering my 11th month of day trading full time with just over 4 months trading ES futures.  And as I look back, I do notice that I've made some great progress in some areas.  But recently, I feel as though I've reached a plateau of repeating certain behaviors, so I will take whatever steps necessary to break out of this loop and get to the next level.

Maybe events of life outside of trading has had a bigger impact than I had initially thought.  And the proof is in my execution score as well as the bottom line.  They don't lie.  A comment made in on my post yesterday was, "'STOP NOW' before you continue to lose more. You simply won't recover your losses continuing what you're doing now."  If I continue to take subpar or rogue setups, then that comment will be absolutely be true.

For the month of February, where I only traded about 2 weeks, I ended down -5.00 ES points gross.  If it wasn't for yesterday's ugly loss, I probably would have ended the month slightly profitable, on a net basis.  February is over, hello March.  Next!

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