Friday, July 6, 2007

Having a bad week.

This week I think I went -681$ overall, which is the exact opposite of what I intended to do, there are a few reasons why and I would like to tell you what I have learnt from this week:

1. Don't scalp in futures trading, the commissions will eat you alive.

2. Keep your stop loss, if you don't you get to a point of losing 20 dollars here, 20 dollars there, and then you "scalping" your way to losing money, what happened to me this week is that I went out of trades before my stop loss have been met, on false alerts, while the market was going sideways, I lost a lot of money trying to join the next market move.

3. Keep the method simple, buy on breakout of resistance, or in a forming trend, don't guess the market next 2 minutes trend, just go with the flow, I could have gotten 30 points Friday without a sweat, but instead I just scalp my way up, which means I took about 19 points, maybe less including commissions.

4. Don't ever set unrealistic goals, like 500$ a day (on 1 contract), just because you feel like that, because it will cause what happened to me Friday, which is averaging up (buying another contract on the top of the trend), and then when Dow went down few points, all of my profit was lost due to the other contract, basically don't trading more than you can handle to lose, for me 2 contracts is too much for you now, and it caused me coming from a profit of 150$, to losing 130$ Friday.

I hope it will help me form somewhat of a trading rules in futures trading, learning from mistakes is the best way to evolve as a day trader, and I would like to help you guys learn from my mistakes.

Have a great week end!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You know, what is most funny, is that it doesn't matter how many times you hear and read about others mistakes. You only really learn your lesson after you make those same stupid basic mistakes on your own, and not once or twice but many times. Only then, when you really come to the point of pain and exahustion, is when you really learn from it and start to change your way...
I wish that you will reach your exhaustion point in a much shorter time than it took me to get there...