Patience - I Could Have Used Some Today
June 20th, 2007First off, the bad news. I lost 3.2R today. That’s my worst day ever.
The good news is that this could have easily been a profitable day for me had I not gotten anxious with my entries. I started off with a couple orders that didn’t get filled - this is becoming a recurring theme for me in my breakout trading. At this point, I already felt like I had lost money even though I hadn’t made a single trade.
Then, I traded BW short way too early. I highlighted on this chart where I entered and where I should have entered.
After this, I traded BNI for a breakeven breakout trade. At this point, I should have pulled the plug, but I just had to try one more trade in HD, which turned into another loss.
That turned a bad day into a really bad day. The funny thing is when I have days like this, they are always tremendous learning opportunities and almost always caused by overtrading.
I’ve been concentrating on applying patience in my stop strategy and it has been paying off. Now I need to take a step back and apply some patience in my pre-trade routine.
Here’s a fact that surprised me - I took a look back at my StockTickr journal and noticed that not a single long trade has worked for me this month regardless of the system. That’s pretty surprising since my long trades typically outperform my short trades over large samples.
Here’s another chart in DRI, which is a nice dummy trade, although I typically don’t take many trades like this any more. Hopefully TraderMike caught this one. 
Related Posts:
Tyro Said,
June 20, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
BNI suckered me in too. Twice, actually! I ended down over 3R, making it my worst day this year. Happy Schadenfreude
Prospectus Said,
June 20, 2007 @ 2:30 pm
Sorry to hear that, Dave. It was a rough day out there.
Michael Said,
June 20, 2007 @ 7:10 pm
Sorry to hear about the 3R. I didn’t catch DRI. In fact, I did nothing today. I was all ready to go short this morning but the surge after the oil report made me call it a day. I saw the market rolling over later but I don’t like entering after 1 PM and I wasn’t convinced that it would break the recent range so I just stayed out.
Dave Said,
June 21, 2007 @ 2:41 am
Thanks for the comments, guys. The really frustrating (or encouraging, really)I thought I had in place.