Brandon, thank you so so much for checking up on me. I want to let you know that I still am trading, I am just not posting my trades on a daily basis anymore. I should have made a post about it, but I wanted to remove as many of the pressures of trading as possible and publicly posting my trades was one of them.
I made some significant changes to my psychology and trading mindset. I am not where I want to be yet as a trader, but I am making significant progress. I have cut down on a good chunk of my problems including overtrading, FOMO, and my patience issues. I've started to really focus on trading well instead of thinking in dollars for each trade. I'm slowly becoming the trader that I want to be. My confidence has gone up and my trust in my trading plan and myself is at an all time high. I am taking actual setups in my trades and I am having green days. I'm feeling good about trading and my good habits that I am creating are getting stronger each day.
As you can see in the calendar below, I am having more green days than red days. The biggest issue for me right now is accepting a losing day. My daily goal is $80-$100 with a max loss of $60, and as you can see I don't stop at $60. I have das risk control set to stop me out fully at $150 including commissions and I have been trading up until that point when I am losing. I set the $150 amount because it is way past my max loss and its there to stop me out when I couldn't stop myself out. That has been 4 out my 5 losing days this month. Like most of my other bad habits including doubling down and overtrading, I have had to use Das risk controls to help me beat the problem. I have just recently lowered my max loss on das to $85. On my losing days I knew that I should have quit at $50-$60 but I have ignored the feeling inside of me that knew it was time to quit. Everyone of my $150 loss days, I knew I should have quit at $60, and I just didn't. I for whatever reason don't want to end red and I needed to get my money back ASAP. From Robert's Rants, he talks about the money being gone, and there is no rush getting it back, I am trying to adopt that mindset.
I checked some of my old trading days and my last 20 days where I hit -$60 or more and continued trading, I ended up green on only 3 of them, and over the 20 days my losses for trades after hitting negative $60 were over $700. My average win % on those days was probably around 25%. With the auto stop out at $85, I will eventually learn to stop out when I know I'm not in sync with the market or I will have to always use DAS to stop me out as long as a trade.
Brandon, if you still have the feelings of trading in the first 5 minutes, you could always email das and tell them to lock your account until 9:35. When you know you can't trade at that time, you will lose the urge to trade at that time. It has worked for me! Das Risk controls has fixed my overtrading, my doubling down, and my breaking stop loss habits.