I have to say that after yesterday it’s extremely nice to be able to say that I have a green day and a decent green day at that. I want to say that it was one of those defining moments in your trading career that all of the successful people have gone through and that’s something that I have to keep telling myself. Now that’s not say that I want to take some haircuts just so I can say all the greats did it at some point, but it is to remind myself that even the titans that we look up to had to overcome some type of adversity and the more that I trade the more that I realize that persistence and determination are necessary traits to be able to make it. The market is an ever evolving beast and it will without a doubt chew you up and spit you out if you aren’t always refining and fine tuning yourself.
I used to think the guys ( like Lucci ) that always talked about how this thing is much deeper than trading were nuts, but I gotta say….you hang around long enough and you will find that it is the absolute true. If anyone else tells you otherwise then don’t trust the bums. This game is extremely MENTAL. I saw a tweet earlier that sums it up.
— Steve Burns (@SJosephBurns) December 18, 2020
Now while I don’t think that I’m a god at times, it does show the emotional swings that you can go through….sometimes in the very same day. Anyone that signs up for this should expect to go through this at some point. For me these times often come when I think I’m ready to level up some and add more size, and then you get humbled REAL quick because you find major holes in your approach that your smaller size let you get away with (at least for me), so it’s back to the drawing board looking for these exploits and trying to put an end to them once and for all, only to move on to the next set of exploits and then rinse and repeat. This thing really makes you look yourself in the face and there’s no getting away from it if you don’t want to lose all of your money. Anyone that says otherwise is untrustworthy in my opinion.
Something that I’m going to actively start working on is not being “biased” on a name one way or the other. I don’t think I realized it before, but my bias makes it hard for me to change to whatever the price is telling me. I’ll see a potential long setup coming, but I won’t take it because I’ve convinced myself that I want to play a name short. In some cases it’s good to avoid being long a name that might have a crap ton of paper, but in situations where they aren’t on the brink of collapse why would I not take a valid long signal. This is my goal. To truly become unbiased and listen and follow price action either long or short. It doesn’t matter, I’m here to trade, not to be prejudice against price action.
Now on to the trades
Pretty happy with this one with the exception of missing the adds at the 12.41 level and then watching it fade another 3 points without me. On the plus side I stuck to my plan and waited for key levels within the range i was looking at and when things didn’t keep going I got the heck out ENTIRELY. I learned my lesson from SCKT yesterday. There’s no point in hanging on to a partial pposition (even if it’s a starter) if it’s not going in your way…this kept me out of the muck and allowed me to come back in for the clean trade when things settled down. Pretty happy with this, but I would’ve liked to have been starting in in the pops back to 15 opposed to the bottom of the channel at 14.55.
LODE pretty nice one here. I didn’t like the strong push in premarket, so I said that I was going to stay hands off until 9:45 and I did. I’m very happy that I stuck to my plan on this one and my first trade I actually went long as it felt like it wanted to retest 8.70’s. I took some and then took it off as I wasn’t trying to be a hero…especially longing on this kind of a move. Later one I saw some weakness and I got involved, but covered a bit too early. Honestly i should’ve been there for the 8.15 retest, but what can you do. Patience and quality entries are the name of the game for me. anything else is uncivilized.
DOGZ this was was interesting. I was using PETZ as the index to gauge the sentiment and never really made much out of it. the tape shifted down at 4, so I got out and well I should’ve been watching the 4.57 level. I’m pretty good at identifying the levels, and now I need to focus AT those levels to take whatever trade is going from there. I don’t want to jump the gun and get biased as that leads to you getting reamed, so I want to assume that my levels will hold or get re-tested and react (long or short) from there depending on what the price says it wants to do.