Review: Week ending October 5 - mixed results

MONDAY
The week started off on a success.  I had the patience to wait for the solid setups, executed well, limited my profit targets to +2 ES points, and I stopped trading once I made 3 trades.  PASS

TUESDAY
Only 1 trade.  And nothing else I saw was good enough to take.  It didn't bother me a bit.  I'm on a roll.  PASS

WEDNESDAY
I started with 3 losses in a row.  Uh oh, I'm no longer on a roll.  I was ready to quit and made the decision to move to SIM.  However, another setup came up, I took it, realized it was a live trade, but didn't immediately close it out. 

It ended up going +2.25, which means a +2 target would have filled.  But the problem was, I had moved my profit target way out.  I broke my +2 profit target rule.  And the traded ended up b/e. 

Monkey alert!

I knew this had the potential to get bad, was quite aware of it, and even told others about it.  For the most part, I thought I had successfully quit at 4 trades.  But the damage was deep, because in the last 30 minutes of trading, I executed *6* more trades. 

Looking back, I had very few breaks during the day, I was fatigued, and my willpower was weak.  All I thought about was making up my losses for the day.  It was comeback time!  And it completely backfired.  FAIL

THURSDAY
No repeat of the prior day.  I limited myself to 3 trades and never changed the profit target.  PASS

FRIDAY
After starting with a scratch, the next 2 trades were a losses.  And it was only 9:50 AM.  What would I do for the rest of the day?  Less than 2 minutes later, I took my 4th trade, I broke the plan.  Another loss.  About another minute later, another trade entered, another loss.  And so on...

I ended up with 5 consecutive losses.  By this time, the damage was once again done, and my mind was all about getting my money back.  Total focus on P&L.  I was quite aware of it, but by that point, I had thought:

"I've already broken all my rules, so F the plan.  I'm going into comeback mode and getting my money back!"

Sure, it ended up OK from the P&L perspective.  But P&L wasn't in the goals of what I'm trying to accomplish this month.  My goals were to simply:

   1)  Limit my trades to 3 a day
   2)  Limit my profit targets to +2.00 ES points

So Friday was a complete FAIL based on both goals.

WHAT HAPPENED?
What was the trigger for those FAIL days?  Nothing new.  It was basically when I either start off with a loss for the day, or have more 2 or more consecutive losses in a row, revenge trading mindset becomes comes into play.

On a good note, there were many instances this week when I was quite aware of my plan as well as my emotions for that particular moment.  And I successfully kept myself out of trades.  Many of those passed trades ended up being profitable, but it didn't bother me too much.  That was great to know.  It was also good to see I was reading the markets relatively well.

NEXT WEEK
I will continue with the plan. 

I will wait for only the best setups every day and limit my day to 3 trades.

I will limit my profit target on every trade to +2.00 ES points.

Upon internal reflection, I'm making good incremental progress.  But I have far to go and it's time to step it up.

One week down, 3 1/2 more to go.