Being on another continent and seven hours ahead of the market makes it hard to trade! That said, I still couldn't help myself and take a trade on Wednesday that went from disastrous to OK and ultimately the one that got away! I left for my flight early afternoon on Monday and traded a little bit that morning finishing with a $5,700 loss. I did not trade Tuesday. Since the market opens at 4:30PM where I am, I figured I would trade for about the first 90 minutes on Wednesday befroe dinner. Unfortunately, the group I am traveling with had dinner plans where we had to leave sooner than expected and I could not be in front of the screens. The market has been very overbought (to say the least) and I saw a pretty good setup to the short-side, or so I thought, early on. After the market pulled back from overnight trading, I thought the trend was down from the start. Well, it didn't quite work out that way. What started as a 30-contract position short quickly elevated to a 70-contract position short around 17,010 by about 11AM ET. At this point I was walking around the restaurant and shops area where we were headed to dinner with my phone and backup charger in hand. I did not have my four screens that I usually do. I did not have all the indicators I normally watch. Was this a smart decision? Absolutely fucking not! This was one of those "do no try this at home" kind of moves where discipline goes out the window. In all fairness, I did not expect to be in the trade that long, but I knew my time was limited and I could not focus. My emotions on the trade were just fine even as I was staring at a $70K+ drawdown while eating dinner. I felt confident we'd see some sort of pullback that would allow me to get out with a small loss at best. I was in the trade until well past 2PM ET when the market finally started to crack. I had 7 limit orders x 10 contracts set to get out of the trade, most of which were just above and below breakeven. At this point, I just wanted to get out for a papercut of a loss and not have it ruin my vacation. As we were getting in the Uber to go home that's when my phone started dinging! My limit orders were going off. I was down about $6K with 10 contracts left. I had my final order about 30+ points below the market price when I looked down and figured I'd let it ride. Within about 5 minutes my phone went off again with the last limit order being taken out for a $660 profit on the day! When you're down over $70K and make $660 you feel like you've won the lottery. That is until the market proceeds to drop another 200 points and you start calculating the "what if I held" scenarios and think about how it could have been a $100K or even $200K winner if you just had some balls and not looked at the phone and stuck with your conviction.
So, what is the moral of this trading week? Very simple. Don't trade when you know you shouldn't. For me that means if you don't have your tools or the time to trade like you're running a real business, then don't trade. This is not the casino and I'm not here to have fun. I am here for one reason only and that is to take money out of the market. Risk management and patience. No need to trade every day and have any trade ruin a vacation!
Looking forward to getting back to the states in a week.
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