Every week since first clicking in on January 21st has been a losing week for me outside of a modest $327 win the second week of March. I’ve been beaten down by my own hand over and over again.
It took facing myself without a filter to admit my flaws and come to terms with my weaknesses. I put aside my pride and am currently beginning the process of reframing how I view volatility in trading.
I cannot live by a boom and bust cycle emotionally offset via coping mechanisms. I have to make peace with every dollar that may leave my trading account and the reasons that can happen so that I can engage in trading on a daily basis from a position of equanimity.
There will be drawdown for large periods of time, both within days and across them. I accept that.
I had to admit to myself that my mental game was not where it needs to be and that this weakness has been actively sabotaging my ability to succeed. It was genuinely difficult to put aside my pride when this was supposed to be something I had completely under control given my background.
But trading is new for me and I am a different person than I was years ago.
You would think this would occur to me somewhere before losing $118k but I am a stubborn individual.
The markets provide many reasons that you can use to dodge personal accountability. That’s on me.
Well, as I alluded to in my last post, I raised my max position size for Wed-Fri of this week.
After trading an average position size of ~$12k with a max of $50k for stocks over $1B MC and $750 (lol) for stocks under $1B MC, I ended this week up $10.1k prior to fees. This is a big deal. Mike Bellafiore makes the point in one of his books that anyone can lose $5k but that doesn’t mean you can make $5k. Trading isn’t gambling in that sense, it’s much closer to chess.
Outside of an hour on Wednesday where I got frustrated, I traded ~50 hours this week sharply, with clear focus, a level head, and competent execution.
This week I executed 500,000 shares across 3000 tickets spread among an average of 40 symbols/day.
Each day it feels like crackhead energy. I have no other way to describe it. For the back half of this week I was commonly in 2-5 trades or actively monitoring tape for my six stock slots. I am at my desk for 10 trading hours a day engaging with the markets.
My hold time from Wednesday to Friday I assume will be night and day. I ought to look at my median hold times not just mean as I think my several seconds-long scalps are skewing my mean hold durations. I had a few multi-hour trades which to me is an eternity.
This morning I traded IREN after a massive earnings yesterday. It round tripped +25% to near scratch leading into today’s trading. I expected some kind of higher timeframe (i’m so zoomed in that yesterday is higher timeframe for me) impact on pulling price back up. I often pay attention to second day plays after impactful earnings.
I got up at 130am and was present from the earliest of premarket hours through today’s close.
After so many large moves from earnings reports yesterday in symbols like AKAM, FLNC, INOD, IREN, XYZ, TTD and AAOI, I wanted to make sure I had all the context and entry opportunities I could.
IREN in particular was setting up for a potential retrace of the highs it had made yesterday.
After finding a low around $61.5, I entered long after it lifted out of the consolidation with favorable tape, and then watched it walk its way up to $63, which had been the prior premarket high established.
When IREN reached $63 it punched through extremely aggressively so I added to reach my full size.
My original exits were intended to be roughly a 75% retrace of the initial move yesterday, however when there was a large seller just above $64 that stalled price and looked like he would turn it, I got fully flat. This ended up being the high for the rest of the day.
I took off my first quarter when IREN initially hit some large offers and then the rest of my size just above $64 for a +$2213 trade over two hours.
My entries were reasonable, my exits were fluid and I made the correct (in this iteration of reality) adjustment to pull them in for a landmark trade.
I’m stoked!
This is what I was talking about in my last post. If you could see what is going on behind the screens over here in terms of the rate of progression of my understanding, the wide scope of spots to trade, 40+ playbooked strats, rapid iteration every day on plugging my leaks, and finally trying to come to terms with my mental game problems in a realistic and hopefully permanent manner (I did 15 minutes of meditating in a park today!), and you saw all the edge in front of us waiting to be realized, you’d be impatient to start the climb back up to even as well! Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
All I want to do is get some rest this weekend, review my trades, identify some leaks, game plan how I could have handled some spots differently, pick out the best spots from this past week and mentally reprioritize them as more significant going forwards, be more at peace with myself and get back to it on Monday.
I’m not looking to up my max position size until I have stacked more wins under my belt and demonstrated that I can trade with emotional consistency. A $50k max position size is pretty hefty to be honest. I’m proud of how I navigated my last 30 hours of trading.
Have a good weekend y’all. OTN