Been a while since my last post. Honestly got a little frustrated with my performance and really needed to put my head down and get to work on finding some solutions and glad I did as I was able to finish the month on a high note!

The thing about trading is that there are so many different methods, skill sets, and styles you can combine to create your playbook, but they need to match your personality or it’s not all going to come together.  I found myself stepping out of my zones and had to review my journal/trades to see where I was getting off track.

A few of the things I noticed:

• I was justifying over trading by trading with small size and extremely defensively. This hurt me in two ways
  1. I’m the kind of person who likes to be a high % winner and the constant paper cuts led to me getting ticked at myself
  2. I lowered size on all my trades so when I actually had a good setup I took tiny size and couldn’t scale out of the trade properly to maximize profits
• Because things were slow and I wanted to make something happen every day I was working extremely hard midday trying to find trades when those have been shown to be my lower probability time periods. I was on full alert from bell to bell and putting myself in hairy situations just trying to find some action.
• I went from posting my P&L daily on twitter to about 60 traders to 1,600 traders after the podcast and it really messed with my head. It wasn’t that I had an ego and wanted to look like a badass but I really wanted to be an example and show it IS POSSIBLE to be consistently profitable w/o big drawdowns. I was sick of seeing people laugh about blowing up accounts and people thinking it was about all or nothing balls to the wall trading and I just wanted people to see there was another way.
• One of the things I take note of in my trading journal are energy levels. I noticed after reviewing a few weeks worth of logs that I was talking about how exhausted mentally I was over and over while I was still getting plenty of sleep. This was a big red flag that something was out of whack and after a few days away from the screens I realized that I was spending way too much time being connected and wasn’t unwinding

With all that said, here’s my plan for June. I’m going to be way more selective on the setups I focus on/trade and if I’m not willing to take it with some size I’m just going to let it pass. I’m going to make sure I come into the day prepared to take advantage of the first 2 hours and then set alerts for areas I want to be aware of to avoid the midday chop. After lunch run some scans and see if there are any setups to take advantage of into the last hour when vol picks up for a bit. I’m also going to be putting a hold on my tweeting and posting for the month. Every post is followed by lots of questions and if I don’t answer right away they pile up so I’m not unwinding well. I’ll likely be back but for now I need to get back into some good habits in my life outside of trading.

Anyway best of luck to you amigos and keep grinding!