Yesterday I didn’t leave my home; I was in a mental cave. After the open slowed down this morning and the $MMED IPO stabilized I took a long walk and called a friend. It helped restore me mentally and emotionally. I feel much better. The last few days have been quite tough.
Interestingly enough I have started seeing sleep paralysis demons, last night was the third time in the past month. They occur from high levels of stress. Definitely something to be mindful of. With my trading and marathon prep and sobriety acting as concurrent stressors on my nervous system.
My running training has been poor this week. I did reasonably well 3-10 days ago but my energy and focus levels dropped off the past two days. I have barely ran and missed a key run yesterday (last long distance one prior to sunday), so I am choosing to run a middling distance today as a shakeout and then rest tomorrow through the marathon.
I have the base I need. At this point it shouldn’t be a question of whether I can finish, but with what time. Even a 10min pace is 4:20 and completion is the objective. I will be happy with anything sub 5:00 and am aiming for 4:30-4:45. Although I have been training to run a 9:45 pace.
My mind and body are beat up but it is all for a greater purpose. I feel good about where I’m heading, there is time for recovery Sunday afternoon and evening.
Trading has been going more smoothly as I set a $1k max position size on my account. This means that I am fluctuating much smaller amounts on a day to day basis and my mistakes are less costly. I can tell that I am building familiarity and developing greater understanding for the nuances of spots.
One of my primary tasks has been to mentally compartmentalize each different trading environment, not in terms of macroeconomic cycle, but context of the stock I’m looking at.
Some of these categories are:
Types of IPOs, earnings, 2nd day follow-on trades, real news, fake news, acquisitions, meme stocks melting up/down, memestocks that have a during trading hours and after hours cyclical personality, large cap/mid cap/small cap/nano cap size, relative liquidity, and others.
I am developing parallel sets of heuristics and seeing the relationships between them across these different trading contexts. It feels good to be gaining familiarity with them and anticipating how tape will affect each of them differently.
I have addressed many issues with my trading in the past week, let alone the past 8. In the last few days I have stopped myself from clicking in and out of choppy meme stocks (eg $BATL) trying to trade off the tape when I have a broader macro view of levels I think it will trade between. Each time I’ve finished for a day looking at all the price levels I was working between etc I see that there was the “god trade” of shorting the top of longing the bottom that would have far outperformed the microscalping that I ended up taking losses on. I had some degree of intuition for identifying these turning points and am looking to simplifying the rest of my trading by taking these longer term trades (multihour holds) on tickers like this so
1. I don’t become emotionally disturbed from added volatility/losses that impairs my ability to execute on other tickers
2. I am able to direct attention to others opportunities as they arise
3. I avoid overtrading and its fees, especially in cheap tickers
Onwards and upwards.