Plans and adjustments for my 4th attempt at becoming a consistently profitable day trader!

Sad to say but my third attempt at growing a small day trading account in September/October ended once again in failure despite a quite promising start. Unlike my first 2 tries, I went with TradeNet which honestly was not a bad experience. It may very well turn out that TradeNet is a scam but when you take into consideration the fact that I only had $399 (the price I paid for their Intro package) at risk it was not a bad option for any one trying to make a start in their day trading career. So with the $14,000 in buying power I started with in September; I'd manage to take it up as high a $14,700ish by my 2nd week of trading. However, After then it was all down hill. In the next three weeks; I managed to erase the $700 in gains and lose a further $700 thereby triggering the max loss on the Intro account and being shut down. Since this; I've been day trading with ThinkorSwim paper and going through the same daily routine I'd be going through if I were trading live money. Although I haven't been keeping strict track of my paper trades; I've been able to uncover and work on some of the "demons" that have been holding me back from consistency which I'll mention later as well as how I plan on countering them.

That being said, this week, I will be re-funding my SureTrader account and making a forth attempt at finding consistency in my day trading. 

My Plan:

1. I will start with $2,500 which will give me $15,000 in buying power this time around. Last time I started with $1,500 ($9,000) in buying power and gave myself a max daily loss limit of $100 or 2 stop outs as my max risk was $50/trade. This time I will give myself a max daily loss limit of $150 or 3 stop outs instead. I've come to realize that I usually need around 3 "bullets" before I should call it a day. Many times I might make an early dumb trade; followed by a good entry in a good idea but get shaken before getting back in and making a nice trade for solid profit. So before I was sort of choking myself up. I was forcing myself to be perfect; not giving my self room for error or room for being too early in entering good ideas.

2. As before; my focus will be on the daily chart (for idea generation) plus the 30-minute and 5-minute charts (for timing entries; placing stops and managing trades). However, I will banish the 1-minute chart completely from my platform as this has been causing me to over trade at the open and make several poor trades for every one decent trade I would make from the 1-minute set-ups. 

3. Keep 5-minute charts of the market indexes up at all time and try to take most trades in alignment with the 5-minute trend of the market indexes

4. I will take absolutely no trades in the first 15 minutes after the open and even try to avoid taking any trades up to 25 minutes after then open. I will let the market indexes and individual stocks form clear trends then look for low risk entries near the 9-ema on the 5-minute chart.

5. I'm also going to invest in a proper laptop (my current Lenovo with i3 processor definitely not going to cut it any more...can't even run ThinkorSwim without freezing every minute) and a third monitor to increase my screen real estate.

6. Finally I will also join a group of traders. Bearbulltraders are at the top of my list.

I should be re-funding my account some time this week and will give an update on my first week's performance next weekend!