Day Trading Results
Friday was a fun day. Made more mistakes then I care to admit. I have to maintain my integrity so I’ll give you all the scoop on what happened. I am not going to post my trades, because I did a ton and I dont feel like typing them all out.
Over half of my students made their daily paycheck very quick and very early – congrats to them. Some people were following my lead in my trading room and by default did the same mistakes I did.
will start by showing what SHOULD have happened (HAD YOU BEEN FOLLOWING THE RULES). The system actually had a good day. 5 trades – 1 loser (3 pre market) That is where the better half of my students traded.
I started the premarket with the same 3 trades: – 5 ticks + 5 ticks + 2 ticks…. Ok. no biggie. Well I only needed 3 more ticks for my paycheck, so I BROKE A RULE at the open and it cost me!!! I took a stop, I came close to recovering then I took 3 more stop-outs.
At my low of the day I WAS DOWN 10 POINTS !!! When you look at the 4 “big mistakes” I made, that 10 points in reality should have been about – 5 points. I broke the rules, I broke the discipline and I have to say openly that I MESSED UP. So what do I do?? Well I had no choice but to put the axe to the grindstone and get VERY DISCIPLINED…
It took all day long – but I FINALLY recovered and actually made profit… Most of my students also recovered.. It was a long tedious, stressful day. I actually had 2 students that LOST money today. One of them was UP his 1.25 points!! HE left for the day – he then decided to come back and trade more later in the day…. The other one made a few more mistakes and ended up down for the day. We discussed it and we made a plan for them to swiftly recover.
Lots of lessons to be learned from this: FOLLOW THE RULES. STICK WITH THE DISCIPLINE.
Friday was a record-breaking day for me! Never before have I traded past 3 PM. I am fairly certain I was never down that much money on Friday (THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS). We didnt panic (at least most didnt) and we recovered!!
I broke some personal rules to: I told everyone that I was not going to trade live while experimenting with the live room — I chose to still trade live. I have rules to trade off of that I broke (I dont share them here as not to give away my system). EVERY time I break rules and discipline it costs me. Fortunately our trading system is forgiving and we got it all back.
So next week, its RULES & DISCIPLINE. I have to be honest. I AM GLAD THIS HAPPENED. Why?? Simple, if we only followed the rules (like most of my students) we would have been done by 10 am.. Bar none.. But it also showed my students that it is not always an easy ride trading. We have some really easy days and sometimes we forget that we have to be ready for tough days. Regardless if I made mistakes or not, the tough days do happen ! This is why I have all the rules and discipline that I do. YES, I EAT CROW – PUBLICLY because I broke a ton of rules… But know what? Its ok, I still came out ahead. Almost all my students did too!
I received a very nice email from a student who watched the whole thing live, I asked him if I could share this and he said yes. Here is a copy and paste of his email:
David,
Unbelievable what you were able to pull off today and with an audience. Once your Infinity went down, any mortal would have pulled the plug, but you hung in there with calm and patience. It is this quality that may make you a born trader because I dare say most could not do this. Hardest of all, you clawed back a few ticks at a time instead of trying for big gainers, which is what you want to do to minimize the pain as soon as possible. Perhaps the Bernstein software is partially responsible for your mindset.
Which leads me to my second point, the use of voxwire. It was my understanding that you would not be trading your full contract size until you were off Netmeeting and free of distractions. Perhaps today’s mayhem was to remind you of this intention!
Again, great trading today. Been around long enough to know when I have seen a master at work.
Dave
So it was an interesting day to be sure!!
Hope everyone had a great weekend !!
David
