Slowly but surely..

I'm trying to focus on quality now, and not on quantity, therefore I'm taking less amount of trades, to make sure I'm not overtrading, also I'm happy with last Friday, which I stopped exactly at my stop point and lost money that day, I'm even more happy for that than I am happy for ending up with profits today and Thursday.

Let me explain why, in winning days, you are happy for being profitable, and it makes your account grow, but on winning days, usually what happens is that I look back at my big winning days thinking I'm going GOD MODE, and then I say to myself "nah.. I can't possibly lose money", and then a chain reaction happens that triggers me to just overtrade, taking every stupid setup I can think of, and then I lose x5 as much as I intended to lose, therefore I glad more for having a tight losing day, than a profitable day.

As for today, I made some money, and then noticed that the range between the high and low in the 15 minute chart is just too big for me, 40 points just going sideways is too much for my tight 10 points stop loss (YM), so after having my small share of profit, I just left the markets and watched a movie. I think that it's the smartest move I've don't in weeks, after I've had the nice winning streak week (triggering me going on "GOD MODE"), I kept thinking I was right all the time, and could just trade every market condition, well let's face it, I can't, and after realizing that, I decided to just earn my money day by day.

Today I've followed my plan well, made only 4 trades and finished profitable, I hope it's the beginning of a new era :)

When do you stop?

Today I'll be talking about the daily stop loss, since yesterday I had a strange day, I started it at up, then made another money, combined I made my profit for the day, which was roughly 150$, and then I started plunging down, and kept going all the way to my stop loss..

So here is what I realized yesterday, I should always start with my initial stop loss of the day (1.5% of capital), and once I'm up with profit, just move the -Daily stop loss- up, which means sometimes I can earn 100$ on a profitable day, or on days like monday when my method works well, I won't stop myself after earning 200$, but rather at 800$ profits, it's what they say "cut losers short, and let winners run" :) I always realized it on stocks, but now I starting to learn my lesson on my equity curve.

So many lessons to learn trading, let's hope I'll stop paying my tuition soon.

Bad week.

I'm not sure why is it that every time after I have a great week, I just blow it out the next, but I think it has something to do with "overconfidence", which is a bad state to be at.
This week I had been trading, thinking "my method is working, I don't have to stop with my stop loss limit of a day", at least I traded only 1 contract which made me lose less money than in my really bad days, but still, I should really stop trading after losing 1.5% of my equity, because after that each trade seem reasonable, even if it's 2 minute scalp of just 3 points, which makes you pay a lot of commission.

I know how to have good days of winnings, but what I need to control of is the losing days, not letting them effect my equity curve, and now they are just making it freefall everytime they happen, and if this keeps on, I'll be going bankrupt in a matter of weeks, this is how bad it has been, and now is the time to change.

I will have a losing days, everybody does, but that fact of the matter is that I need to make them as small as possible, and let the profitable days run.