Reset And Recovery

Yep, I had to reset my $50K Combine. Tuesday was a rough day and I did trade on tilt. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a screenshot of the Performance Center before I made the rest. Instead, I'll be working off of my memory and try to keep it as accurate as possible.

I started Tuesday's session well. I was up around $700 in profits just scalping away. The indices were still affected by the news in the Middle East and I gauged a rather bearish overall sentiment. The first half of the day started well.

As we approached noon, the markets became a bit more unpredictable. It wasn't really slow. Instead, dominant bars lost strength rather quickly. When I tried to enter long on a pull back, the "pull back" didn't stop pulling back. It just made fresh new lows. You can probably guess where I'm going with this. I took on losses that basically saw my cumulative P&L graph decline. I then started to go negative and kept trading. Up until this point, I wouldn't say I was tilted. I was still making plays, but most of them worked out. It's one of those days.

Near the end of the session, I admittedly got a bit frustrated and decided to max out my position size so I put on five lots. At this point, I already had a loss of $700. Not only did I give up all of my profits, I'm also in the hole by $700. As you can see, this frustrated me a lot more than it should've. I saw an opportunity and sold five contracts of NQ. At first, it went in my favor. Given how volatile NQ was, I hit my daily loss limit and basically broke a rule.

I'm still struggling to control my emotions sometimes when I take consecutive losses. This video has really helped to frame losses in the right mindset. As hard as it is to do, I do need to treat losses and losing days as simply part of the game. Rather than trying to make back the losses, it's just a matter of slowly chipping up. This is exactly how I approached my trading today (Wednesday).

TSTrader Performance Center

Absolutely rough day today. The first thing to look at is the cumulative P&L. Instead of mentioning it every single time, I just assume that any P&L figures are all net of fees. The markets opened slow since the FOMC minutes were coming out later in the day.

Despite the slower open, I was able to trade a cumulative profit of $295. I definitely struggled to find and take opportunities. Unfortunately, I did have a string of trades that didn't work out as both ES and NQ were rather choppy. Not only did I return my profits, I took on a loss of $477. 

Unlike yesterday, I didn't lose my cool. I slowed down my trading and tried to wait for "safer" signals. What this means is that I would look for certain structures where there are repeated wicks. This provided a better exhaustion signal.

I grinded my account back to even so I ended the day with a profit of just $37.50. You can see that my gross profit was $222.50, meaning I paid $185 in commissions and fees. Crazy, right? Overall, it was a good day. I ended the day with a small profit and I kept my cool through the whole period I was underwater.