@Carlos M. @Mike B I just finished the Onboarding Class. It was super helpful, thank you guys! I'm new to trading. I traded on the simulator today, and I want to build good habits as early as I can; I started journaling my trades. Can you take a look at my journal entry and let me know what other information is important to journal each time? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n0UBC4i0mtjbRtvwK5gE7s1YCkC3Ec2Gj5VqYFHQU6E/edit?usp=sharing Thank you,

Kevin, I am using mental stops mostly right now but ONLY because I felt like I had reached a point where I could handle it. When I was turning around my trading career and starting to find consistency, I HAD to use hard stops. It was the only way. So please use them. They will save your account. I used a hot key script where I would click on the chart where I wanted my stop. Then I hit the hot key and it automatically purchased the amount of shares I could get with my risk amount ($20 when I started) and the distance between entry and stop.

I use Tradervue Gold currently for my statistical journalling. I've tried a lot of alternative spreadsheets and websites such as Chartlog, but I keep coming back to tradervue. I really think Chartlog is on to something with their much more attractive chart presentation and psychological state journalling, but ultimately the hard data analysis is what's makes the most difference in my trading, and I haven't found anything I like better on that front than Tradervue so far. Since Tradervue does lag behind on the more traditional journal features, I like to use OneNote to put together a general run down of each day, including screenshots from DAS.

Monday +1.4R 4/4 2:1? 2/4 4:1? 1/4 WMT 1MinOrbUp +0.37R 2:1? YES 4:1? NO For some reason I had my stop at bottom of first candle, I usually do it below VWAP. UBER 5MinOrbDown +0.14R 2:1? NO 4:1? NO Again a really wide stop, hmmmm. what was I thinking this AM? NVDA.1 Double Top +0.18R 2:1? NO 4:1? NO NVDA.2 BOUp@Level +0.76R 2:1? YES 4:1? YES Traded pretty sloppy today, I was fortunate to be green.

Your job in SIM isn't to make money, it's to learn as much as possible. Your confidence will fluctuate, pay no mind to that and just keep grinding away. Challenge yourself to learn the most on red days, so in a sense they become your most profitable days down the line. If you have a max loss day, or a string of max loss days, all that is is the market telling you you have more to learn, so ... learn and feel good about it! Wake -> lift -> market prep -> trade -> review -> enjoy your life -> repeat : p gl!

Journal template looks good. Make sure to include the setup / strategy you used for every trade. If you place a trade without a setup / strategy, that should turn on red lights on your discipline and rules compliance. Also you can add a daily checklist of rules compliance to identify possible patterns of lack of discipline. Then you will define daily goals to overcome those patterns and you will evaluate your progress on those daily goals. Don't get too many goals at the same time. Work in 1-3 goals, daily, get improvement and move to the next goals. The simulator stage of your learning process is very important, is where good or bad habits are formed. Many traders build bad habits in sim, start trading real only to get back to sim to get rid of those bad habits. Also rank your trading days with a good / bad trading criteria, not with a "money" or P&L criteria. Some days we trade bad, don't follow our rules and we get away with a good profit. This time we got lucky, next time we are going to give back that $ or more. So a good trading day should be one where we followed our rules, regardless of the P&L for the day. As you advance in your trading path you will improve your journal. Make sure you have a document with your trading rules / trading plan, review it every day before your trading session and during your reflection / journaling process. Avoid overtrading, journaling won't be useful having to spend so much time in so many trades. Your learning and improvement will come from trading and also from your journaling process, so don't overlook the later.

Having talked to many traders, and in my own experience, taking a "trader circuit breaker" helps to interrupt bad habits. Sometimes traders are trapped in a vicious feedback loop of bad trading => bad results $ => bad mindset => bad trading and stopping trading helps to halt that pernicious loop. But you really need to take a step back, no trading even in sim. Is a detox therapy from trading. Then some clarity comes and you will see clearly what you were doing wrong. So take some days completely off trading, then use your time watching other traders recaps, watch / re-watch some success webinars, review your rules and your journals. Then come back to sim and follow up your discipline, make a daily checklist of your rules and follow up your rules compliance every single day. You will want to define a period of acceptable rules compliance and discipline, that could be a week, some weeks, a month, etc. before coming back to trade your account. Just be mindful that old bad habits don't disappear from overnight. The same is with good habits, it takes some time to get rid of bad habits and it takes some time to build good habits. Your goal here is to use your rules to govern your trading behaviours and practice those rules and behaviours until they become an automatic response, a second nature. Then, after your reach your goal of rules compliance for the period of time defined by you, go back to trade your account, starting small, and define rules to increase your risk/trade or share size. And don't believe those telling you that sim doesn't work. We build bad and good habits in sim and we need to come back to sim to get rid of the bad habits built in sim. If you are not able to be disciplined with your rules in sim you won't be disciplined trading your account.

"R" is a way of measuring risk and profit. Most good traders risk the SAME amount of money on each trade. Let's say it's $20. So on a long trade you set your stop such that if the price drops to your stop, you lose $20. That loss of $20 is called a 1R loss. Conversely, if your trade works out and you make $40, that is referred to as a 2R gain. Your R will also determine how many shares you can buy. If your stop is $0.10 from your entry, then you will be able to buy 200 shares because $20/$0.10 = 200.

I am testing this feature of DAS, trading from montage L2. If you right click in L2 > Config Level 2 the config window will open. In the column config, move ORDER to the right and it will show a buy button in every price level in the bid, and a sell button on every price level in the ask. You will be able to send limit orders typing # of shares and clicking the price level of your choice in the bid or the ask. This is particularly useful in SSR stocks, rising devils or just to take profits in a patient way in congested price levels. An as these will be limit orders, you will be adding liquidity.