Roller Coasters Drop

Yep, that's what the graph of my P&L looked like today.

TSTrader Performance Center

If you take a look at my cumulative P&L with fees, I started the day slightly in the red. But, I was able to recover quite nicely and just go on a tear where nearly every trade brought my P&L to new highs. This was, until, I had a massive $690 loss. 

How exactly did that happen? Because I'm stupid. For a certain trade, I decided to go full out and bump my position size to two contracts. The signal itself was good as in it had a high probability of paying off. I was taking my standard play of trying to fade a pullback from a dominant bar. With this setup, it is important to get out if the previous bar engulfed.

For some stupid reason, I didn't want to take a loss so I kept holding until I was at risk of hitting my daily loss limit. And so, in just one trade, I returned all of my profits and then dug myself in a hole as I just couldn't take good trades after this hit.

This was such a costly mistake where it would've been so much better to just take a smaller hit and then find the next opportunity. Unfortunately, I did force the trades because I really wanted to hit a $1K day. This might cost me a lot as I am closer to my weekly loss limit for the week ahead. A reset in Step 2 might be needed.

Lesson learned. Hopefully.