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Gav's trading blog - Perseverance, Consistency, Confidence

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August 2006: Week 3 review

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It is time to review result of this week’s trading. It was indeed a bad week for me. Negative begining, facing discipline problem, missing trades and close a losing trade on options expiration day. However, I closed the week in black again .

This week, in fact, I had more losing trades than winning trades. I was lucky, profit was big enough to cover the losses. The importance of let the winners run is shown. If kept taking small profit instead of giving some space for the winners run, I would most probably end the week with loss.

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So far so good for August. Next week is the last week of the month Another 9 more trading days to go (that’s 1 1/2 week to go). My objective for the coming week will be ‘Stick to the darn rules, stupid!’

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Dummy day trading #16 17-August-2006| E-mini Nasdaq| Short trade closed

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Though I did read the cautious words from Mike’s blog about options expiration, I decided to trade if any dummy set up was found. Short position of E-mini Nasdaq was established below 10am (chicago time) candle. It took 1 hour to stop me out. Darn! However, everything was done by following my rules.

One trade closed with 1-R loss.

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Technorati Tags: E-mini, Nasdaq, trading journal

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More on ‘The next trade is more important’

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More on Next Trade Is More Important

I decided to relook again my previous posting on “Next trade is more important‘. I discussed briefly on experience of having a string of winning days. Now I am looking at the losing experience. It seems to be a common problem among traders. Well, I made the same mistake on tuesday’s trade as well. Coincidently, ugly was having the similar problem yesterday.

What is the relationship between my E-mini S&P trade and Gold trade? Absolutely NO. But, at the psychological side, trader has a tendency to relate them. This is similar to the theory of points and line.

In the same dimension, it is easily for one to connect two points and make it a line, though these two points are, in fact, have no logical relationship

I find it to be so true in trading. When I had one or two losses in a row within a trading day, unintentionally, I become cautious. I do not want to lose money again and I do think that the probability to success today is low, since I had made two losing trades before. So, I assess the third trade in a different approach, (though I still think that I am following the darn trading rules!). I am eager to take profit now when I see the candle is narrow at the top of chart, (well, that’s lucky if the position is in the money) or I am moving stop loss to break even point far too early, just to avoid losing money, again. Oh, not again!

I do not have a concrete treatment for this kinda of psychological problem, since I am not a psychiatrist. To me, the best solution so far, is to stop trading for the day if I have two 1-R losses in a row. Because, I KNOW MYSELF. I am just not cool enough to make another trade immediately after 2 losses.

Anyway, market is always there, let’s fight another day.

Postmortem 17-August-2006

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Ok, Let’s get straight forward (Again?!?). I did not make any money today. But, neither did I lose a penny. Enough of BS. I did not make any trade today. Reason? Well, I was physically tired., and secondly I did not have any good dummy set up and good feeling across the market. In the morning, Nasdaq just kept running without me (it basically meant I did not have entry point at all). All right, it got the punishment it deserved in the afternoon, ended the rally and retraced gave back some early gain . I called it a day after 1130am NY time to catch some sleep.

This is not an easy week, for me.

We continued our discussion on profit taking. And Mike posted his reply to Vince on partial profit taking here. Jason did some recaps of his recent performance as well. Traders might find something familiar…

Blogging using Performancing for FireFox

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Yup, I switched again. No, not trading, I mean blogging tools. After introduced by Trader Eyal, I have a look at Performancing for FireFox. Let’s try some Foxy style of blogging.
Well, first impression. Performancing is lighter and faster. It basically means it is faster to load the editor. I am not sure why did Windows Live take me so long to load.

But something is missing here…I can’t find smiley faces. 🙁  Or maybe I just missed out some setting? Leave a comment to me if your know the trick. Please… 🙂

Anyway, it is still a great tool to blog. It integrated Performancing metrics at the sidebar. So you can immediately view yoru visitors statistics.

Here is a snapshot of Performancing for Firefox. (I am still trying to figure how to configure in order to upload my image to my server…)
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In short, impressive blogging tool. 🙂