After a bad week of day trading, sometimes you have to step back and think of a redemption plan for the week ahead.
I’ve been having a really hard time sticking to my rules. As I was reviewing my trades and looking at my profit chart, I saw that for a while I was uptrending, then I was stagnant, and now I’m in a place where I start breaking into the support level of my profit chart.
There are a few reasons for that, and one of them is that I’m trading all kinds of things instead of sticking to my normal setup. There are a few proven strategies that I love and that work well for me - an overextended gap strategy, gap and crap strategy, micro float strategy that I like to trade in the afternoon, and first red day overextension strategy. The problem is, they don’t happen very often.
Sometimes there will be a span of several weeks when none of those four setups are present. And then there will be this one day when I’ll catch myself not following my rules as I simply get tired of waiting and start trading less than perfect setups.
If I’m honest with myself, I do it because I want to break out of my range as my profit chart has been kind of stuck. But instead of thinking of profits, I’ll be trying to get back on the path of discipline. It means that I won’t trade anything unless it’s one of the setups that I’ve mentioned. And if I experiment, it will be done with a paper account. It’s not as much fun, but it’s a safer way to try out new strategies without getting upset over losses.
The funny thing is that I do very well when I follow my strategy and trade 10-30 minutes a day, and I do much worse when I spend the whole day in front of the computer looking for new stocks to trade. It makes me appreciate a Pattern Day Trader rule (PDT) and think of all the great traders who became profitable and successful despite (or thanks to) starting with a smaller account and fewer opportunities to trade. Having fewer trades means that you become more picky with them, which leads to better trading overall.
What do you think about it? Do you agree with me on PDT and its impact on beginner trading?