trade euphoria

Been over a year since I traded. I threw $600 on AMP and started a little NQ adventure with plans of $50 to 100 per day just to see what would happen. That quickly changed into euphoria. Hard not to see $$ signs when you make double and triple your normal daily job income in just a couple hours.

Will try again.

That is all. Placed this here for confession

looks like euphoria took over the 2nd day. without seeing more info like #contracts traded, mae range, it's hard to tell if that second day was the inflection point to downfall later on.

either way, it sucks you actually let the whole thing down when you were up 1100%!!!! hope you made withdrawal on those profits. always withdraw 100% after 100% return!!!

i've been in the same situation, aggressive side takes over when you see money piles up.

in bad trading you have two factors at play from my own experience and observation in others:

1.big size
2.no stop

if you just have only ONE factor...you can survive.

small size with no stop -at some point you should realize that you're wasting time holding to losses-you can get out with your account intact). Ex is my rich uncle Imoney.

or

big size but disciplined enough to cut losses however big (hopefully not to exceed 50% of your account so you can at least bounce back). Ex. me. I've always been comfortable putting decent size behind my setups, but even in the worst of days, i cut it to where i can come back next day to trade.

if you have both factors, you'd have no chance.

you plan on coming back? <$1000 is hard to trade the NQ, $5000 with 1-2 contracts is pretty safe.

long time no see MC now
drop and give me 20 for going awol with your winnings

Did not withdraw yet so lost it all. Or really lost $518 because until you make a withdraw, it's technically not your money yet to keep. Started with $603 and ended with $84.

I agree with your big size and no SL observations.

I started out with 1 contract, worked my way to 2 after around $1200, then on and so forth. I was trading anywhere from 2 to 4 contracts the last couple days before the crash. My thought was $750-1000 needed per contract with my 50 tick kill stop loss so basically risking 25-30% per trade to make 5-15% per trade. I had tentative plans of running around 80-90% wins and using 50 tick kill stop loss to protect capital and taking wins of 10-25 ticks based on what the market would give. That math results in a positive net gain if taking only the best set-ups.

On the massive loss of $5800, I was running 4 contracts and had SL at $1000 (50 ticks). I removed it when the market broke down rapidly on the ECB news Thursday morning because I was mad to see the previous day's $1500 profit go down the drain. I thought I deserved to make $500+ on my trade...wrong!! I figured I would weather the storm and once the 9:30 open happened, price would pull back for market participants to jump in. That way my plan to get out, but market drove down hard. I got sloppy, cocky and forgot that sharks are out there every day to take your money so I paid the price.

I'm going to jump back in again with another $600 start and most likely do something like 25 TP and 20 SL. I'll probably jump in and out quicker than letting the TP hit so that I can hustle my way to $1000 to give myself some breathing room. Based on the prior 2 weeks of trading, my winners average MAE was somewhere around 15 ticks so the 50 tick kill SL may not be needed.

To grow the account, I think $1000 per contract is reasonable with a 20-25 tick SL. That gives me 4-5 losses in a row before I'm down to the minimum margin per contract needed. Until I get to $2000, will probably use something more like $600-750 per contract. Once I hit $2000 balance, I can go to $1000 per contract. Once I build up to 4-5 contracts, I could lower the risk more. At the point I'm trading 4+ contracts per trade, that's plenty to grow the account.

not going to throw $5000 of my own money in to play it safe. I've done that before and lost it down the drain.

I would rather put $500-600 in 10x and get one of them to work out with reasonable money management. More chances to fail.

I did the same thing once in Amazon. I sell products on Amazon on the side. I decided to make my own private label brand product and sank $13k into it thinking it was going to be the perfect product and I would succeed. I failed and flopped on it. Looking back, rolling out 10 products with only $1000 invested each would have given me more opportunities to see which product is successful and then put more money into only the successful products.

Either way, waiting until everything is perfect to dive in and take a shot never works. I always prefer to jump in and figure it out as I go. More chances to fail, but gets you closer to breakthrough at some point.

Ever thought about 10 ticks a day as a goal?

Those are good numbers. I prefer to do the base hits strategy, but knowing me, it would be hard to just take 10 ticks and walk away.

Base hit strategy works great until I get greedy or pull my SL. Base hits stack up nicely as long as the losers are controlled.

the amazon example is basically similar to putting all your money into a single trade, so we know that's 50/50.

Your plan of putting small amounts makes sense, but your risk is hugely skewed towards the beginning ($600 give you about 20 ticks of room to work with after margin req). I think it's no different than putting 5k in and managing risk at $600 at a time, at least this way, you give yourself a better chance.


But to be honest, the underlying issue might be more of mindset (tilt).

your'e a marine right? discipline should come natural to you, even under pressure. unlike us civilians lol

Yes - tilt!

Yep - not active marine now. I've been out for awhile. Finding discipline in trading is very different from anything else. It's right up there with raising teens in the difficulty level.

Here is an interesting video from Renko and Range Trading thread (i dont care about their indicators but the video was worth my time):


Good luck MC. Hope things go well for you.
-Jason