Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Complete lack of control

What can I do then document facts. I started day with good things on my mind. I wrote on piece of paper "Where will be stop for this trade?", I had to read it and answer before I made a trade. I also "decided" to be cool and distant so I don't fall a prey of my emotions.
I shorted a bit late usd/jpy, I say late because I was ready to short it at 31 but I didn't pull a trigger. I got 9 pips on nice scalp.
Next one again in usd/jpy didn't work and in the end that was low for a day. I lost on that one -11 pips.
So now I was from nice positive scalp profit for a day slightly in red. So far to that point I kept my cool. This development of losing nice profit throw me out of a balance. I was looking to quickly find a trade so I could have again profit for a day. Minute later I was shorting eur/jpy without magic question where is my stop on that trade. I don't have a stop. Two minutes later with spike against me I added half size to be full margin in. Emotions completely took control. I could understand in my mind that it's not great trade going against eur that is rallying and going against usd/jpy that is bouncing from the low. So my eur/jpy short was stupid from the start. But once I'm in I will stay in, there is no getting out until I'm profitable when I'm deeply emotionally involved.
So I was at a mercy of my emotions or my ego, call it as you want. I really proved to myself that I can't rely on myself, trust myself and bypass destructive emotions. With all my will power and thought out "strategy" I failed.

-41 pips



2 comments:

HPT said...

Trade Journals are great to see what we did in the past and how we can improve. If you go back a year or two, what do you see? Are the same mistakes being made? When you say strategy, what does that mean? I see no formal strategy, whether it be from buying when the RSI gets to 20 or maybe buying the previous days pivot low. Where is the strategy/plan going into the day? Trading isn't easy, so why treat it that way. If your going to be making 1 trade a day, I hope you decide to base your decisions based off market profile or pivots, and enter trades based on whether you believe the day to be trending and entering with the trend on pullbacks, or entering a trade to fade highs/lows based on your belief the market is range bound. Write a simple strategy, and see if you can follow it for a week.

FX said...

HPT I understand what you are addressing here. In general I don't have a problem with absence of defined strategy. Maybe I'm wrong with having that attitude. So far discretion trading is something that I wouldn't change for now. My lack of control on following stops, impulsive adding to losing trades and stuff like that is thing that is bothering me. Every trade that was beyond -10 to -12 pips unless it was half size trade should be closed with stop loss in past 3 months or more.
So I'm focusing just on that.