Hello Fellow Traders, After reading the email from Andrew about “When to Quit Day Trading” I wanted to offer my perspective as I am in almost the same predicament as the trader Andrew referenced. My current trading career is (1) planned live trade, 2 unplanned live trades due to not realizing I was not in simulator, and about 4- or 6-months simulator depending on if you want to count the 2 months I spent just watching charts. I am an active duty United States Marine who is about to transition from the military after 22 years of service. I originally planned on becoming a Forensic Accountant upon retiring from the military. I have acquired my bachelors in accounting, Master in Forensic Accounting, and achieved a Certification as a Certified Fraud Examiner; however, after being introduced and reading Andrew’s book I have decided to invest all my time to becoming a day trader prior to my retirement from the military in December 2019. I found myself continuously asking the same question as the trader referenced, “Is there any criteria to determine when to quit trying to learn day trading?” I believe the answer to the Traders question is, “When you as a trader and your family no longer have the desire or ability to accept failure as a possibility.” As long as you and your family have the desire to learn, work, and sacrifice for this career than you should pursue it. During my time in the service I have been away from my wife, son, and daughter more than I have ever wanted to be. I currently work away from where my family lives. Monday through Thursday it is easy to focus on Day Trading and learning; however, due to connectivity issues in the hotel rooms, I spend at least 10 hours on the weekend watching the Mentorship webinars, classes, reviewing my journal, and developing the next week’s trading plan. I have found the best thing is to communicate with your family on why you are doing what you are doing and get their acceptance. My family views my time spent learning to day trade as a way that they will get to see me more in the future. They honestly have become more upset with me when I don’t put forth my full effort on the weekends to learning Day Trading, as they have bought into the fact that becoming successful in this business will allow me to spend more time with them. I could easily retire from the Marine Corps and become a Forensic Accountant Intern; however, this career path would still keep me away from my family, so we (My Family and I) have decided that $x amount is worth risking to learn to Day Trade. If I lose that amount, then oh well it was worth it and I will move on to something else; however, if I don’t then my family and I will have a great life day trading while getting to spend more time together.

Article about three studies that highlight the benefits of accepting emotions and thoughts, rather than judging them, on psychological health. When a stressful situation causes negative emotions, accepting feelings of frustration or upset — rather than trying to pretend you’re not upset, or beating yourself up for feeling this way — reduces guilt and negative self-image. Over time, this will in turn lead to increased psychological health. Feeling okay about feeling bad is good for your mental health

Hey guys. I just wanted to put together a little document on what I have been doing to learn the /ES. This isn’t exclusive to futures, this is for ALL trading and for those looking to give themselves the edge and to take their trading to the next level. This document is for beginners as well as jaded traders such as myself. The point here is you need to adjust how you view the market and change your thought processes. Recording Trades This may seem like a no-brainer, but not many people do this. I didn’t realize the power of recording the market until I started doing it. There are plenty of free programs out there (I use Open Broadcaster Software, OBS: https://www.obsproject.com). Since I am only trading 1 instrument, I just need to record my primary monitor. If you are trading equities and use several monitors to trade from, this may become a bit of a challenge. However, you should really only try to focus on 1 stock as it is anyways. In this case, you can record the screen that you are trading from. The other option is, just record 1 screen and ONLY trade from that screen. I also highly recommend that you record the entire day’s action, even if it’s just 1 stock that may die in the middle of the day. The reason for this will become clear in the next section. But the point here is that you NEED to be recording what you are doing, because in the heat of the moment, you don’t always know what is happening, but the recordings can help you with that. Reviewing your Trades If you record your trades, like I mentioned above, then you absolutely need to spend time reviewing your trades. I know many people here simply copy and paste their trades into their journals, put in a little blurb about what they saw happen, then never go back or care to look at it again. While this is good in practice, unless you are actually reviewing your trades in depth (and you are able to remember what was happening and going through your head at that time), there’s really no value to the journaling; you need to review! This is where the recordings come in. I mentioned in the chat that I record the entire day then I go back in the evening and re-watch everything. While this may seem a bit extreme, this is the only way you can improve your skills. Why? Well think about it this way, in the heat of the moment while the market is open and you are trying to trade, do you think you are really seeing every possibility? Are you seeing the probable outcomes of your trade? Probably not! Furthermore, you are under the “gun” so to speak of getting in at the right spot, managing the trade and exiting with a profit or a loss. This all happens at lightning speed and sometimes, you don’t even have a second to think about what is happening. When you re-watch the recordings in the evening, you are more relaxed and you can observe A LOT more of what is happening in the market/with your trade than you can while it is happening in real-time. Even doing your journal review at the end of the day, you are still a little stressed from the day and may not remember/see everything that you thought you remembered or saw. This is especially true for a really bad day. You do not need 6 and a half hours at night to literally re-watch what you already saw earlier in the day. Instead, scrub through the recording (this means taking the time scroller and moving it to different sections of the video) and find important points in the market action. Areas of major support/resistance, technical levels, VWAP, moving averages and most importantly, reversals. If you focus on these areas exclusively, you can start to see what is happening at these key spots and learn what to look for. Also, do not do this right after the market closes. You need a few hours to decompress after 4PM EST. If you jump right back into it, your mind is still going to be fried and you will be missing out on key points, so take a break and do this after dinner and before bed if you can. The recordings allow you to calmly review the market action, what you did right and what you did wrong and learn from what you are seeing, which leads me to my next piece. Taking Notes Of course, we all went to school at some point in our lives and had to take notes on what the teacher or professor was telling us. Or, we read several textbooks and took notes on that. Trading is no different. We are in school essentially trying to learn a rather subjective subject with about a million variables going on at every microsecond. But, there is a lot of information in all of this noise and by taking proper notes, you will be able to find small pieces of information that can help you gain your edge. Now, taking notes, trying to trade and also watching the market is literally impossible. Some people use dictation software and speak into a microphone that records their statements either into a document or just a voice recorder. This is an incredible process! I tried it but the dictation software didn’t understand me and since I hate the sound of my own voice, re-listening to myself is impossible (yes this is petty, but something about my high-pitched nasally voice drives me batty). However, if you have a pen and paper available and you can quickly jot down a quick note, even if it’s an important price level where you saw a large order get executed, will still be very helpful. However, what I am getting at here is if you do the recordings like I mentioned above, then you will have a much easier time taking notes when the market is closed, you are relaxed and you can focus a bit better on the action. You would be amazed as to how much information is out there when you are able to sit back, relax and just watch and take simple notes of what is happening. However, I have found an even better way of note taking for trading which is in the next section. Asking the right questions Everybody learns at different paces and via different styles. One way of learning that I felt has been dramatically helpful for me is simply asking a question then finding the answer to it. While we can read books, watch videos and listen to others talk about their trading, until you truly understand the “why” or the “how” you are just blindly following somebody else around and this will get you into trouble. When you are unable to look at the market from a purely objective perspective, then you cannot understand what is actually happening. I’ll get into this more in the next section, but it’s important to discuss here. If you come up with questions about things you are seeing or things you are not understanding, then you will be forcing yourself to find the answers to those questions and forcibly build your knowledge. Because now, you are seeking the answer instead of being told simply “look for this”. Well, “how do I look for this, why do I look for this?”. Here’s an example: “Do value areas and High-Volume Nodes (HVN’s) on the DOM (Depth of market) provide entries and price targets?” This is a question I wrote down on my notepad and I am working on answering. Another question you can ask yourself is “How strong is the VWAP in AAPL? Does AAPL respect its VWAP?” Or, “What happens when a large order is executed on Level 2? Does price retrace then try to retest that price again? Is price being held down by a large player”? It is then your job to find the answers to these questions. You won’t find the answers in one day or in one recording, but now you have something to work with. Just sitting at your screen, watching the live market or even a recording without any direction or guidance isn’t going to help you. I know because I spent 4 years doing this. Sitting at the screen and trying to make sense of what is going on with all of this noise. Well, by not having questions to answer and trying to seek the truth or answers within the noise, I just sat there and wasted my time getting lost in all of the noise of the market. Get a pad and a pen, write down your questions then watch the market live and most importantly, watch the recordings and find those answers. Once you find the answers to your questions, watch how your trading changes. Charting your own path (pun-intended) I mentioned above that most of us like to follow something blindly, especially in such a complicated environment as the markets. But you need to learn to think for yourself and think objectively. As humans, we need structure. It’s how our brains work, it’s how we live our lives – with structure (and lots of it). We are logical beings and we need “rules” in order to function properly. Everything in our lives has structure and a set of rules. Driving, working, sleeping even eating. There is structure and rules in place for everything in our lives. Trading is no different. So, we seek out ways to find rules that say “If a then b”. Well, I hate to break it to you but most rules don’t work. The market isn’t about absolutes. Far from it. There are millions of people in the market place (as well as machines) all making decisions based on their subjective point of view of what they “think” will happen. Sure, some people do have rules and I am not saying you shouldn’t have any rules – quite the contrary, but you need to understand that just because you have a horizontal line on your chart from a higher-time frame doesn’t mean that price is going to touch it to the penny (or tick) and bounce off of it. This happens, but usually, you have larger players that know that all retail traders are looking at that level and most people have stops there. So, the large players will throw a bunch of money at that zone to break it and trigger the stops, then take the money from the stops getting hit and push price back down and even further lower. Well guess what your “rules” told you… “let’s go long when price breaks this level”. Guess what just happened? Johnny Stock at Goldman just pushed price through the level, trapped you (and millions of others) into a failed trade, then sold it faster than cold water on a hot day, just to get a better price. This happens all the time. This is why you need to answer QUESTIONS rather than have rigid rules that tell you A=B. Because that’s not how this works. Yes, rules for stop losses and profit targets are critical and you can be somewhat rigid on those, but just understand that you need to think for yourself in this and develop your own way of viewing the market. Having somebody like Andrew at your disposal is critical because while I encourage you to answer your own questions by putting in the time watching the recordings, Andrew can absolutely help you in getting the answer a little bit faster and even assist you in finding that answer. And it’s not just Andrew, anybody here in our wonderful community can answer your questions. We are all here to help one another out and to work together. I implore you to come up with some questions (only after you have watched the markets long enough and watched some recordings) and find the answers to those questions. Everybody is different and the questions and answers you have may not work for me, but that’s quite ok. We are all here to build knowledge on the market and to most importantly, learn for ourselves and develop our own style of trading. While it is impossible to master the market (anybody who says they have is full of themselves), we can certainly take advantage of certain imbalances. If you think you mastered the market, you have a rude awakening coming because the market is impossible to master and will put you right back in your place. But put in the time and effort, and you will be rewarded. Do not look at trading as a way to get rich quick or start making tons of money, because you will just lose tons of money with this mindset (I know from personal experience). Treat the market like it’s a school and a game that you need to learn the strategies of. Approach it like this and follow what I said above and you will reach success IN TIME.

In the video "How to think like a professional trader" series, Mark Douglas mentions this book as the first on trading Psychology: The Investor's Quotient: The Psychology of Successful Investing in Commodities & Stocks. I haven´t read the book but for Mark comments, book description and reviews I´m going to take a loot at it soon. In this blog you will find an extensive review of the book...

My wife is also trading but she is doing SIM still. It helps alot because after every day we go through all trades and a list of rules we have put together. The person that breaks the rules needs to do the house chores etc. haha

Hi everyone, made a video about psychology and journaling, hope you enjoy it is my first video ever. Please leave feedback in the comments positive or negative I dont care 🙂 PEACE ♥

A couple of things that have helped me out quite a lot in recent weeks: (1) I use hard stops for all of my trades. This puts a quite precise limit on what I can lose on a trade, and takes the edge off completely psychologically of when to get out of a trade. If I get stopped out, I simply move on to the next trade (or stop all together - ref. trading rule No. 3 below). At the moment I am mostly using a stop loss of 20c on e.g. ORB and VWAP trades. For both of these I try not to enter a trade unless my stop loss is then below or above the VWAP (for long and short trades, respectively). Perhaps later when I get better at this, I will start using mental stop losses, but at the moment it makes sense to me to use hard stops. (2) After I enter a trade I will sell/cover 1/4 of my position after 0.2 to 0.3c gain/loss if the trade is going in my favor, and then I will move my stop loss up to the average entry price (as Andrew says he does). This takes the edge off considerably, since I am now in a risk free trade. I will then try to let it run until I can exit with a real profit to risk ratio of at least 2:1. (3) I stop trading if I have two losses, where I get stopped out according to rule No. 1 above, in one day (without any winners). Period. Shut down the computer and walk away for the rest of the day. (4) Since going live about three months ago, I have focused mainly on getting good at ORB and VWAP trades (only taking one or two trades per day at the moment). I simply try to stay away from other types of trades, though I think I will start dipping into ABCD and reversal trades now in the coming weeks. I think it's generally a good idea to break things down into smaller pieces (in life in general), and then try to figure out the smaller pieces one by one - rather than trying to figure it all out at once (unless you're Einstein the latter approach will probably not work - and it's probably not how he did it anyway). Trading rules are always dynamic, I think, so the above is where I'm at right now. Will most likely change in the future as I gain more experience. Hope this will help.

When I find myself thinking about P&L during a trade, I start talking out loud about the price action. For example: 'We are making higher-highs and higher-lows. This moving average is clearly support. The original price target is still valid.' I've found this method forces you to process the market information, which leads to being more patient and objective.

Hey Nick! You are experience what most of us are going through as new traders. Biggest issue for me when I started live are the two you just explained and I believe this is what hurts a lot of us to become consistent and grow our accounts. First issue is we become strict with our winners and take profits right away and we become lose with our losers and let them get bigger than they need to wiping out several winning trades. Second is that on red days we keep trading to try to make it green or break even, and boy what a mistake that is. When we hit our goal we stop trading, feel great, and hang out in the chatroom or just leave to go enjoy the day. Just Perfect. But when we are in the red, we want to be green so bad that we keep trading and lose 2x or 3x more than what the loss was originally. My biggest losing days have been trying to dig myself out of a hole to end green, wiping out hard work on other goods trading days. We need to be strict with our losers and losing days and call it quits and we need to be lose with our winners (not too lose take profits on the way up lol.) As for your trading above, AMD I find to be a hard stock to trade most days and I stay away from if there are other things on the watchlist. It tends not move fast enough most of the times and I like stocks that have a lot of momentum in one direction. And AXON was very choppy based on that chart so not sure how you could have traded this better. Carlos.

Hey Mick. Thanks for the response. I am glad your sticking with it. I wish I could tell you it gets easier before it gets even harder but it doesn’t. It takes a long time unfortunately to learn this craft and be a expert at day trading. I have been trading live for over a year now and I still struggle a lot but I can tell you every day gets just a little bit easier. I feel your pain on how emontial draining it is daily. You do get down on your self a lot atleast I do. There is just so little room for error with trading and there is so much to master to be consistently profitable. But it helps to talk to other traders and know it’s just not you with the struggles. Keep at it. It took me forever to finally get disciplined to only trade one or two setups and that is it. I highly suggest you take the top one or two setups you like and only trade those til you are profitable doing that than move on to other setups. Even if you don’t see your setups for the day you don’t trade that day because eventually you will start to see your setups more and trade 2-3 times a day and you will start to see your success rate on trades go to 70-80%. Disciple was the hardest thing for me in the beginning and still is at times. But you start getting disciplined real quick when your losing 1000s of dollars which I have done. Good luck to you Mick.