Your statement: "I learned that when my focus is on trading skills and executing sound trades, I do well and enjoy trading. When my focus is on making money or recovering losses, I do extremely poorly. " As a new full time trader myself in the few couple months, I can resonate with that statement. We need to keep very focused, work hard and keep learning, discerning and growing our trading intellect, patience, intuition-gut-feeling and psychology to survive the learning curve long term. Wish you the best! If we care enough about a result we can certainly attain it! As Andrew and many others in the community has said, so much of this is psychology. I have done about 700 real trades since October 15th. I think it will take me about 5,000 trades to really get my chops honed to even figure out what kind of a trader I am becoming/evolving. Every trade teaches. I love it though. Absolutely love everything about trading (the good, the bad, the ugly and staying in touch with the markets) and am so pleased to have found the BBT community. Cheers!