Trading-Mentality

The past week was probably one of the best weeks for me for quite some time. I felt like I finally got my groove back with consistent entries and trading the signals as they appeared. To keep emotions out of the equation, my exits were systematic through the use of trailing stop losses.

Price action over the past week was not the greatest. While I didn’t notice any strong signals nor did I make any major plays, I think there’s an opportunity here to talk about how I can go about optimizing this trend trading strategy.

Focusing on one trade at a time continues to pay off. This was observable over the past week, where I was able to control my FOMO by not taking on additional trades if I'm already in one.

The less is more approach that I’ve been taking has been working out well so far. Instead of scanning my entire watchlist and then placing multiple trades at a time, I focus on one trade at a time. This does mean I’ll miss a lot of signals and plays, but it also means I’m really focused on the trade that I do enter. By taking notes directly on my charts, this has strengthened my analysis greatly.  The next challenge is to work on FOMO and making sure that I do not enter trades that shouldn’t have been considered.

This post will be a bit different. I don’t have any trades, wins, or losses to share for the past week. Past few weeks, in fact. This is because I’ve been experimenting with a new approach to optimize my journaling process.

Can artificial intelligence (AI) tools change the way you do market research or trade? I think so, if done right.  First off, ignore the clickbaity YouTube videos that use ChatGPT to generate trading strategies for you to back/forward test. Maybe you’ll get somewhere, maybe you won’t. However, I do think conducting market research and staying on top of high-impact events has gotten easier. This is something I’m beginning to experiment with through Perplexity.ai and their “Labs” feature.

You know market participants are tired of Trump’s tariffs when this phenomenon is dubbed the “TACO trade.” Trump Always Chickens Out, or TACO, perfectly describes the fatigue with the constant imposition and pullback of new tariffs at seemingly arbitrary percentages. Is this some kind of 1,000 IQ market manipulation play or pure idiocy? Nobody knows. What is known, and observable, is that the US dollar index has not been trending positively. On an aggregate level, this indicates a gradual and systemic reduction in USD holdings.