New Trader seeking advice

[leilij 6]

Hi BBT community,

I am Leili and finished my first week of live trading. Ended the week red which is fine because live trading is nothing live simulator and I am learning new things every day.

My R is $10 so the losers are not giving me heart attacks and the winners are not giving me much either! lol! so just working on my strategies 🙂 

I have a couple of questions that would appreciate if the BBT members could help me out.

1- I have Kyles' hot key buttons that would go into trade with a fixed risk. The problem is that when I decide to get into the trade it would take a couple of seconds and therefore I miss the good entry and the stop is not tight and I normally don't get to 2R reward. I was thinking of going in and then setting the stop loss after I am in the trade but going in without a hard stop freaks me out. Any suggestions?

2- What is a realistic daily goal? (based on R) I don't want to set a goal that is hard to achieve but I don't have any common sense!

3- Another thing that I am lacking is identifying my bias for a stock. How come one stock that has gaped up keeps loosing it from the open and another goes higher and higher?! Any resources and books that I can read to get a sense of the market?

4- I live in Stockton, CA. Any traders close by?

Thank you and I appreciate you taking time and sharing your insight.

Best,

Leili 

[leilij 6]

Thank you PeterB. I use IB for by borker.

First week was really bad, I broke every rule in my playbook, over traded, revenge traded, etc. I think I got that out of my system. This week I am mainly focusing on my rules and only trading with there is a pattern and will not focus on my P&L.

I am hoping that after a couple of days/week I will start getting more consistent winners. 5R daily would be amazing given my trading these days!!

 

 

[Brendon 146]

@leilijHey! Congrats on going live and keeping it small.

Handling losses is something traders never fully gain control of...so instead of trying to completely remove yourself from that emotion I focused on improving my accuracy. I found that being very picky on my setups helped me 'outweigh' my hulk days. For example last week I was up $800 then had a 2K unrealized, instead of wasting time sitting in the trade and potentially turning that loss into a 4k loss (which would be very hard to come back from), I took the loss and moved on. I was down $1200. I changed my approach to now work on smaller modest scalp trades and ended to the day green $800. Accuracy has helped me become profitable along with minimizing my losses. You reach a point where how much money is enough? Money became a less interesting driving force and it was more about 'can I trade well and win at the game'. I'll admit at the start it was all about the money lol. That's when I began to improve my trading.  

[RTrader 20]

I agree with Peter B. When you are starting out, you really are not going to know how you will trade and what your edge will be (or your specialty). It took me years of trying things to figure out what works for me and I also stopped trying to correct and change my style. I just created something that works around it. 

Focus on probability, and at least for me I don't use a daily goal. I use a weekly goal instead. I do this because I never know when the good days will be. On good trading days I can make my whole weekly goal in a day or even in minutes. I always push it and trade bigger on good days where there are lots of setups in the Nasdaq futures market. It's really important to not turn trading into a 9-5. The fact is you can make in a month what some do in a whole year. 

To better understand why a stock or commodity trends while others chop around, it is all about order flow and price action. Watch it and learn about it. You will get it over time but it takes a lot of screen time to read price action well. It's especially hard with stocks because all stocks trade differently.

[robgreen14 0]

@RTraderWhen you talk about order flow are you talking about volume analysis?

[leilij 6]

Had my hulk day today. I am so embarrassed that I never though it could happen to me. I broke every rule. I went into trades with no stop loos and with big shares in hope of making up my loss. 

Here are some of the reasons that I think it happened to me:

- My R is $10 and since I don't have the confidence to get in trades quick I tend to have a wide stop. So the most I get out of a trade is 2R 

- My daily max profit has been 2.5R compared to my SIM trades which were average of 5R.

- I would get FOMO seeing everyone in chatroom hitting their daily goal in the first 10 minutes and I would be down R. (I know it's stupid but I am confessing here!)

I will probably go back to SIM for a couple of days or not trade at all and just watch the stocks. I am a little discouraged and not sure what to you.

Have a question from the experienced trades out there:

How long did it take for your to become consistently profitable? @Brendon@peterB I know it's different for people but the reason that I am asking is I wan to give myself a timeline and be OK with the losses during this time. 

Also any ideas on how to analyze by trades to find my mistakes would be greatly appreciated. I journal everyday (except today because there was no point!)

[RTrader 20]

On 7/9/2020 at 3:48 PM, robgreen14 said:

@RTraderWhen you talk about order flow are you talking about volume analysis?

Since I am a futures trader, I watch the depth of market (DOM) window. I only trade the NQ (Nasdaq) so with experience I've been able to identify the volume and how price moves, who is in control and how powerful and committed the buyers or sellers are. I can also tell when it's just running stops, and when algos are running the market vs. actual hand traders. With stocks you can see this with level 2, but it's very hard if you trade different stocks all the time, because every stock has it's own way of trading.

[RTrader 20]

Peter has some good suggestions.

I really agree with the loss limits. Although DAS risk controls are platform only. A really pissed off emotional trader simply logs into TWS and trades more 😞 That is what I used to do when I traded stocks.

Some brokers have risk controls on their side that you cannot change (at least not without annoying them with emails or calls to remove it). I have my futures contract size reduced so I can only enter so many contracts. I had one of my biggest losses last Wednesday that could have been prevented if I had this set up at my broker.

I keep good records in Excel of every days result, gross and net so I know my PnL, %, and fees. Plus I track it weekly and monthly. I look back through history a lot and see that I can make money. So when I have a losing day I know I just need to reset the mind, and I normally bounce back quick.

It took me 5 years to get profitable.

[hailchaser2 185]

7 hours ago, leilij said:

- My R is $10 and since I don't have the confidence to get in trades quick I tend to have a wide stop. So the most I get out of a trade is 2R 

If your stop is too wide, then your R:R probably isn't reasonable. Your R:R is one of the most important things that determine if it is a trade you should take or not. I still make this mistake quite often, I can clearly see it during my journaling and review, but in the moment, I mess it up sometimes.

- My daily max profit has been 2.5R compared to my SIM trades which were average of 5R.

This could be due to the later entries in LIVE, or partialing sooner in LIVE. I just returned to live this month, my winning days are usually 1.5R-2.5R, but I only trade the first 30 minutes every day

- I would get FOMO seeing everyone in chatroom hitting their daily goal in the first 10 minutes and I would be down R. (I know it's stupid but I am confessing here!)

I had to mute chat before the open, it has really helped. I usually turn it back on after the first 5-7 minutes.

 

 

A few more things I can tell you I have done, they may help you also. I'm with CMEG, so they have automatic daily stop losses. I started at $100, then went to $60, and am now at $30 per day. I also use $10 stop loss per trade.

I also watch this 5 minutes before the open.

 

I was Live for a few months and slowly drained my entire account, I went back to SIM on June 4th with a different attitude, I made it clear to myself that I didn't know how long it would take to become consistent. Maybe it will take 5 months, Maybe 5 years. It helped my psychology. I had a great JUNE, so I went back live in July. I tracked and treated SIM just like a live account, journaling tracking setups and outcomes. Focused on making good trades instead of profits.

Watch all of the mastermind classes in the psychology center.

The number one thing that helped me improve was becoming much more self aware during trading. Another big help was only trading a few setups. Orbs, double tops/bottoms, and lightning bolts.

 

 

How many different setups are you trading now?

 

Here is my improvements with the changes I described above.

 

We all have hulk days and get discouraged, it's a grind, just keep reviewing and looking for things you could have done better. The more market time you have, the more the patterns that work for you will start to show themselves better.

 

Hope my rambling post helps some.

[leilij 6]

@peterB thanks Peter. It make me feel better that all this is normal and I am not alone. I read your post on journaling and will give it a try. The stats are very interesting and would be a great help. 

Thanks again 🙂

[leilij 6]

@hailchaser2 wow congratulation on changing around your trading. looks amazing.

I do meditations here and there and I think I will add one before the trading as well.

I made two changes today (based on Tiffany's recommendation) which I think helped me:

1- increase my risk to 20

2- hid my p&L

 

I was down $60 today after 3 bad trades and then turned it around and ended the day green 🙂

 

[hailchaser2 185]

10 hours ago, leilij said:

@hailchaser2 wow congratulation on changing around your trading. looks amazing.

I do meditations here and there and I think I will add one before the trading as well.

I made two changes today (based on Tiffany's recommendation) which I think helped me:

1- increase my risk to 20

2- hid my p&L

 

I was down $60 today after 3 bad trades and then turned it around and ended the day green 🙂

 

That's another change I didn't mention, Peter the mod, not Peter B here, talked about how he doesn't look at his P&L until he is finished trading. I started doing that and it really helped me also. It was difficult to stick to this change, but once you master it, like Peter said, it's freeing. 

[leilij 6]

Yes, I was watching his recent success webinar and heard him mention that. It's hard but it definitely gives you more confidence in trading.