So for the 2nd week since going live with TradeNet/TEFs, in terms of profits, was definitely far better than my 1st week! This week I grossed $434.57 versus $186.75 which turns out to $336.17 versus $116.40 after commissions and fees. On the surface, this does appear to be really good and in fact I am happy to be green. However, when you dig deeper, it turns out that I really didn't trade that well!
Firstly, my accuracy fell from 58.8% all the way down to 41.7%! I took a total of 24 trades this week versus only 17 last week. These trades included a lot of really poor set-ups hence the fall off in accuracy. Where I did compensate, however, for this fall off in accuracy was with a few really solid winners that resulted in my average winner being $87.96 versus $47.23 from last week and my average loser this week was only -$31.81 versus -$40.79 from last week giving me a ratio of avg.winner/avg. loser of 2.76 which is really, really good as it far exceeds the 1.5 to 2 range I like to shoot for.
So the adjustments I made after last week's analysis definitely worked and up until Wednesday's close I actually traded really well. In fact, Wednesday was record day for me as I recorded something in the region of $370 in gross profits! To be honest, I think this was my problem I got overconfident on Thursday and this lead to some really sloppy trading on that day. I ended up taking 4 trades, all losers and lost something like $225 in that single session! I really should have stopped trading after the 2nd loser as I could sense something off with my trading. Even more so, after my 3rd consecutive loser I definitely should have shut up shop as I like to give my self 3 strikes maximum before calling it a day.
Things I want to work on for the final week of September and going forward:
1. Adherence to my 3 strikes rule! If I am to stay in this game, I need to be disciplined and call it quits after 3 consecutive losing trades. There's always another day!
2. I'm going to take both unrealized and realized PnL off my trading platform for 2 reasons. The first reason relates to trade management. I've found myself making trade management decisions based on unrealized PnL and this has been causing me to leave profits on the table! I need to focus on the price action and volume of the stock instead while I am in trades. Secondly, I want the way I'm feeling on the day, the market environment and the quality of opportunities that are emerging or not on the day to dictate the number of trades I take and also when I decide to call it a morning. I've found that when I'm up after 1 or 2 good trades; I'm reluctant to take quality signals for fear of giving back profits but when I am down on the day; I force trades with low quality set-ups trying to make back my losses.
3. Not losing sight of the bigger picture idea/bias/set-up in my case the daily chart. This week I took a couple losing trades that in hindsight could have been avoided if I had just taken the time out to confirm alignment with the daily chart first. So on my technical analysis platform (ThinkorSwim), I have removed all time frames below the daily. There's only the daily, weekly and monthly. I will only then transfer a ticker to my execution platform (which has the lower time frame time charts aka 1-minute and 5-minute) to look for intra-day set-ups after it has already confirmed what I want to see it do on the daily!
I simply want to focus on making good trade after good trade after good trade and not on PnL or making money etc. I know I have edge, I know profits will come as long as I make consistently good decisions. Looking forward to next week...let's do this!!!
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