Keeping Myself Accountable- A Review of My Year

[Samuel Blake 3]

Hey All,

This is my first forum post and I am doing it as a review of my last year of trading as well as to keep myself accountable. Like many traders, I have had some great success and many failures. I am not the type to give up easily and overall I have enjoyed the process/challenge that trading provides. In addition this post is a reminder to myself that I am in this process for the long haul and that someday I might be able to read this as a successful trader.

I started last April trading in sim and I watched the markets daily looking for common patterns. I am fortunate to work at a job that allows me to watch the market and trade while at work. At the time I was not a member of BBT, and yet somehow I began trading high of day breakouts and had some success in the bullish market following the COVID crisis. I traded live at home and simulation while at work. As my trading path continued, I began to struggle and slowly make more and more mistakes. Too big of share sizes, no trade book, no education. This challenge led me to joining BBT around October and I suddenly had the success that I was hoping for, as demonstrated by my P/L chart below. I began to focus on the strategies that worked for me which was the ABCD pattern. I am confident I will continue to improve and slowly build my risk tolerance.

This leads me to the challenges I face currently and the changes I need to make to continue to improve as a trader. I have been trading live daily (at work and at home) since December. The past three months have been consistently profitable and I have seen some slow yet consistent gains. This month has been something of a challenge and I had made mistakes that I felt needed to be addressed before I can continue to scale my share sizes. First, I made a share size error earlier this month. I thought I had bought around 50 shares but accidentally bought 250! A easy mistake to make but I handled the loss well. The following day I significantly reduced my risk size and made 5-6 trades all of which were losses. I attribute this to revenge trading, trying to make up for my mistake. I returned to simulation for about a week before returning to live trading with a reduced risk size.

This month has been unbelievably challenging to find the right stock at the right time. My pattern entry criteria does not occur daily, and when it does I have struggled to be able to confidently manage the trade while I am in the middle of it. I am long biased and don't short stocks currently because I have yet to switch my account to margin (I trade with a cash account and rotate days to allow money to settle). If it is a true ABCD pattern, my entry criteria does often hold true and works fairly well. I am working on holding my positions longer and look for trending moves. My success since December has revolved around taking a small partial at 1R in an attempt to stay in the trade longer. As I have continued to improve I now know that in order to continue to trade profitably, I will need to look for better risk to reward opportunities. This means having the confidence to hold until I get near my target. I also find it incredibly difficult to get out with a smaller profit rather than hold. Often a trade moves 1.5R in my favor before turning around and stopping me out at break even or for a loss. Maybe this is because I didn't know or see a previous level that should be marked on my chart? Each trade is different and sometimes the trade won't work out perfect. For example, today I took an ABCD/ascending triangle entry on $CAN for a 45c raise in 1 minuted (2.5% or so) but because it didn't hit my profit target I held too long and got stopped out. Could have been a great trade had I managed it differently.

If you have read this far, thanks for looking. I am happy to be a lifetime member of BBT and look forward to reporting my progress in the future. I am about to do a solo bike touring trip across the US starting in May which will take several months. I plan to continue on the path of trading once I return from my travels. Thanks for reading and if you have any suggestions or recommendations, feel free to chime in!

Sam

Trading P-L Picture.pdf

January P-L Picture.pdf

March P-L Picture.pdf

[Samuel Blake 3]

7 hours ago, peterB said:

you missed February 🙂

If you catch a move of 1.5R and your target is 2R and you get stopped at B/E that is nothing wrong until you can prove statistically that it is a problem.

having a non winner is till better than having a loser so if you make a rule of stopping at B/E after you reached 1R you will soon find out the culprit. I can only guess it is a too tight stop as it is very common mistake.

Thanks! I didn't include February because I only traded for about 5-10 days throughout the month, I was on vacation for most of it. It emulated the January chart and not the March chart.