This is a tough one. I got impatient, took off my risk controls, and blew up this week.
I really believe honesty & transparency is the only way that I will get what I want in life.
If I cannot look myself in the mirror and tell myself the truth about my flaws, my inadequacies, and my errors, then I cannot set out to address them.
I was mulling over my errors while laying in bed, unable to fall asleep for hours staring at the ceiling, and a thought stood out from the buzzing self loathing that was the primary cadence in my head. It was:
“I need to make peace with my losses or there will be nothing left to lose.”
There is no point, absolutely no point, in opening up my size to try and recoup my losses until I am a profitable trader. And it is unrealistic, purely a fantasy, to believe that if I am not able to string together winning days while trading small, that trading larger will address that issue.
You can say to yourself, yes but I’m not appropriately scaling size in and out of positions. If I was using scaled risk management across trades instead of just using my (small) max position size across the board, then I would be able to cut my losses in trades and let my runners run with larger size.
That’s fallacious though because once I took my risk controls off and was down money, I just used the NEW max size as the primary size of choice and still wasn’t scaling in and out of positions, now I was just punting $$ 30x as fast.
It’s ugly, I won’t lie. I believe I lost in the neighborhood of $41k this week. $11k on Tuesday then $30k on Wednesday. Something like that.
Then I talked to my partner, regrouped emotionally, made a plan and set out to execute it.
I traded one share per execution since then.
I need to make cents before I can make dollars. I need to earn my size.
I don’t need to learn this lesson again. This really cemented it for me. $40k is a lot of money. It’s quite a large amount. My ability to replace that (as savings) would require me to spend long hours at a poker table which I do NOT intend to do. And getting a job.. well. That’s not happening.
“The only way out is through.”
It’s funny that I actually feel even more confident than I did last week. I am such a delusional son of a bitch. I really do believe that I am improving as a trader each day. I am a much better trader than I was last week and unbelievably different to the trader I was last month.
“Through chances various, through all vicissitudes, we make our way”
I’m not backing down. I’m doubling down. Part of my regrouping effort was to take a brutally honest look at how I am spending my time. What I am CAPABLE of doing. The output I can commit to long term. And what I have been ACTUALLY doing. I’m ashamed to say that I have not given this my best effort.
I’ve given it a better effort than most but who cares. At the end of the day it’s me against me. I do not care about the standards of anyone else, or the level of effort they may seek to put into this activity.
Practically all (maybe actually all?) of the other people I meet in these trading communities are putting in a tiny fraction of my effort. The other people I hear about striving to really make this work at institutions put in effort round the clock. That is the standard that I hold myself to.
I have my tech figured out. Our software is constantly improving. Our ability to research and gauge the efficacy of strategies has improved enormously. I have a MASSIVE amount of work I can do. I can watch the SMB video library, both their public and private libraries. I can finish reading the half dozen quality trading books that I have in my living room. I can do endless research via our training tools. I can review my trades. I can introspect and reflect on our playbook and how I am doing personally.
I will do all these things.
Each night I am laying out the man I intend to be the next day. What that man would do to have a GREAT day. What he would not do. The things I will avoid. And if I tick them off throughout the day (or avoid them) then at the end I will be satisfied and it will be one more day closer to my goals of netting a penny.
How could I tell my kids in the future, that when things got hard, and it looked like I wasn’t going to be good enough to cut it at this activity that I had dedicated myself to while in good health, good spirits, satisfactory financial condition, sober and healthy in mind and body, that when it finally came down to it. I failed at it simply because I did not put the requisite effort in. How can I tell my kids (or myself?) that truth? I will make this happen.
I need to completely kick my porn addiction. I need to get into peak physical shape. I need to condition myself into being a mentally healthy, cheerful individual. I need to align my psyche and my time around becoming the best trader I am capable of being so that I do my pod partner justice, my financial wellbeing justice, and my future family justice. The cost of failure in these regards is that I live life as a fraction of the man I’m capable of being. And that would be the ultimate letdown.
I traded one share today. I’m going to up that to four shares next week so that I can practice scaling 1, 2, and 4 shares as three tiers of size in and out of trades. I AM GOING TO HAVE MY MOST FREQUENTLY USED SIZE TO BE ONE SHARE. I will only add size when trades are working (onsides) for me.
This weekend I will engage in active study, research and review while attending to my spiritual and physical maintenance. I will keep my sleep schedule in check so that I wake up at 430am on Monday and resume my trading hours well rested and with a game plan from the night before.
This really doesn’t have to be that hard. I am making it hard for myself. Let it flow. It can just flow.
I can read the tape. My intuition is dialing in quite rapidly. Next I need to refine my emotional control and make sure that I click in judiciously so that I do not aggress into a bad position that is quickly out of position.
By getting my mental state in line and having my emotions flow through me, accepting them. Not using coping mechanisms that cause me to loathe myself or detest my choices. By living in a way that I am proud of outside of trading, I will clear my mind to bring the best version of myself to the markets each day. This is important not just for refining myself for trading but also for my future wife and kids. To be gentle and patient and loving and caring, without allowing the emotional struggle or burdens of my work to be shouldered by them through me.
I have a lot of love for myself and the man I am becoming.
Can’t lose sight of that. I’m only human after all.
There is a great poem that my dad enjoys by Rudyard Kipling called “If”
I present it without commentary:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!