End of Day Journal (8-20-10)

Summary:

I finished the day at -$110 (200 share lots of TNA, paper, no commissions):

I think this is the first day of keeping my stop losses within the trading plan ~$0.20. Emotional wreckage today, if you feel like reading about it, I added a journal section under the details.

Details:

Posting the TNA chart for trading posterity and the market charts so I can showoff my S/R lines (going to refer to these for the weekend's strategy posting).

The best trade of the day - the 10:00 long before walking away from the lunch session. Exit signal on the 11:25 doji?

From now on my goal is to have all my charts be a reflection of my risk tolerance. 

Journal:

I was an emotional wreck today; I found myself looking at the charts with something like disbelief... and anger, frustration, feelings of betrayal, and plenty of swearing.... as setup after setup failed (my arbitrary 'flying by the seat of my pants' setups). I kept repeating the mantra, but it just wasn't clicking. I kept thinking about how whacked out the market is, how nuts all the other traders in the market must be, and how I am doing everything right but no one else is going with the flow.

Pfft.

How can I go from having some semblance of control over the last two days to emotional meltdown today? The only difference that comes to mind is that I was coming off of a 7-day win streak two days ago, and today I am following 2 days of losing; not just any two days of losing, two days of quasi-emotionless losing. Two days of 'ah-hah' moments and setting up personal (and probably public) expectations for today: 'Is today the day all of this comes together? Does this really work?'

Hmmm.

When I woke up this morning, I felt like something was missing. I was doing the mental picture thing but it just wasn't quite doing the trick. I had been meaning to clean up and edit some of my personal specific refutations, and I thought this might be a good time to do it - re-write them, clean them up, and re-establish them in my head. This helped a lot and afterward I felt that I was ready to go. I placed one early trade while I was writing them and felt good about it.

I sat on my hands for quite awhile, and then took a couple of decent stabs at it. I hit the wrong hot key on the 8:40 and by the time I reversed prior to my stop at 8:55, I knew I was in trouble. Things went downhill from there. I tried the usual remedies: reading over my worksheet, chanting 'The market can do anything', and trying to write down specific refutations, but nothing worked and I kept getting pulled further and further into the rut. By the lunch session I was in a foul mood, but things looked good for a long, so I put in a position right before taking off for break and a workout. I tried the mental affirmation game the entire time I was taking a break.

So I came back from the break and - heh - I hadn't been stopped and I had managed to catch an uptrend. This reminded me of what I had posted to Fozz last night and I began to think that I could pull off an emotionless afternoon.

Not to be. By the time the 15 minute doji on the 11:30 and subsequent fail rolled around I was back in the abyss.

Again - I have to ask - why? Why didn't the practical guidelines that I had established over the prior two days work today?

I am not sure that I have an answer.

But something happened at around 12:15 today. I was standing on my head, chanting my mantra and picking my toes, all while trying to laugh at my frustration (which sounded more akin to a nervous death rattle at this point), when I noticed it was time to put on another trade. I decided that I didn't care what happened, this trade could do whatever the hell it wanted, I was done trying to figure things out. So I put the trade on, sat in my chair, and mentally checked out. I watched it. The price went up. The price came back down. After 15 minutes and another doji, I found myself thinking 'Looks like it wants to go back up' so I bought some more. Then I watched again. When it looked like it wanted to come down, I moved the stop above the last buy and waited some more. It was then that I began noticing that I was relatively calm about this whole thing. I started thinking about it, and realized that on that last trade I had made a conscious decision to quit trying - notice the language I had used? =p It was out of frustration: after seeing setup after setup fail, I had thrown my hands up and said 'Who knows what is going to happen?!' But it worked. Thinking about it now, until that point in the day I had not fully acknowledged that I had no clue about the market - I was trading to try to make things happen, and I expected them to happen.
 
I realized today that the belief system generating all of this junk runs incredibly deep. I can see that I have a lot of work to do. But I was probably setting myself up for a day like today. Personally I was expecting a very good day - it was the end of the week and I wanted to go out on a profitable note, I had had two days of losses while trying to get in the habit of the emotionless belief system and  it was getting easier, and I wanted to post a profitable day on the blog. Bingo. I had created my own doom.

It wasn't until I got to the very end of my rope today that I was ready to accept the fact that I could do nothing about the market. I either need to learn to recognize when I am setting up expectations and nip them in the bud, or get a much shorter rope. Probably both.

I am going to post a definitive entry/exit strategy over the weekend and follow Mr. Douglas' prescription (try it for 20 trades) next week. And I am going to try and track down those expectations and run them into the ground.

Another step in the journey.

Have a great weekend.