Well, what can I learn from my biggest loss yet. 

Well, remarkably, it was emotional, but I have cried on losses before, and this was quite logical. So I actually took it really well. I thought a lot, I prayed, and then I sold. 

So what were the events that led up to my greatest loss. Well, I had it in my mind that instead of doing these little scalpings that really aren't getting my account anywhere, I would go a different route. I would just take small positions and average down with the idea that it would bounce off that, or I would cut my loses. Well, it worked out okay that day. I was just a little above the stock price when I went to bed. I had it in good mind to set my alarm to see if it spikes in early AH (which it did). I usually set my alarm, but I didn't because I am sick with the pregnancy so I fell asleep on accident on the couch. I woke up to being 20 percent down on my entire account. I should have just cut it there; but I wanted to see if it would pop during the trading day, but it continued to downtrend all day. And by the end of the day, I was down about 40 percent. When I was down 47 percent, I cut it as I couldn't let it go more than half of my account. 

First of all, I broke one of my rules to never go more than 20 percent of my account in a trade to shelter my account. And I also broke the rule of using the turtle equation of U=E x p where you only go 2 percent of your account in on a trade and the position size rule P=floor (U/x X N).  This is found in Sykes' Penny Stocking Course book in Chapter II.4 where it talks about risk management. With this equation, you take the amount of your account that you will risk and divide it by the stop and the true range. The tighter the stop the higher position size, and the looser the stop the lower the position size. I was actually figuring this equation out for my trades a couple months back, and if I continued to use this equation--I never would have put my whole account in here and taken such a big loss. I also broke another rule of average down one time with the same position size. Another reason to not go in with your entire account is it is just harder to take a loss when you know that the percentage of the loss is on your entire account.

We all have different trading strategies and rules according to our strategies. The biggest thing is to develop a rule list and stick to them. Some of mine are above and a number of them were broke before my biggest loss since I started trading 6 months ago. This goes along with what a follow trader said, "Discipline beats prediction. Risk management remains your edge!"

So even though this was obviously a bad thing to lose half my account, I learned one critical thing from this that I would not have learned had I not taken this loss. It was completely due to reading the chat section in ETHZ. Had I not still been in the trade, I would not have come across the posts that I did.  The chatter wrote, "i suggest stop buying stocks a the top. you need to wait for stocks to fall down, channel sideways, then buy in the first bullish signal. in short, stop buying at the top and start buying stocks at the bottom."This one post--though so simple--really opened my eyes. I took stocks like OPEN, SNGX, and IXHL. These stocks all did the same thing, they broke out, they came back to their original trading range, traded sideways, and then broke out again. Take OPEN for example, if I had waited 9 trading days from its last breakout at $5, then it would be at 1.50, would then double bottom for an inverse head and shoulders, and then would uptrend back up to $5 4 trading days later. I saw that I need to think much bigger picture if my account is going to go anywhere. 

I have never thought of myself as a swing trader. But my whole strategy now will be revolving around swinging. I will need to be patient; this is so important that I will say it again: patient! If we are going long, we must buy at discounts in order to make money. Now I know that isn't always true with day trading patterns. The security can be up a lot and still make money trading with the right pattern and using good rm. While this has worked for me in the past, in light of my overall account, this strategy just isn't working. 

I must try something new to get a different result. This will mean that I will need to do a lot more watching and a lot less trading. Take VCIG for example, it broke out two times in the past 2-3 weeks, you just had to be at around low .80s before the break out and you would have woke up to a nice profit. Watching for when the stock finally comes down to a decent level, trading sideways to confirm, and then wait for the uptrend. And here, instead of scalping, you would be waiting for almost a 100 percent up to a 300 percent increase in price before you sell. This will all take a lot of practice on my part as a previous scalper. But after looking at some charts, I really believe that this will ultimately be the answer. Like Sykes and Bohen say, a lot of traders just need to trade less. It is less trading and more waiting, positioning, ultimately more waiting, and finally selling for profit. As far as rm, you will still need to cut at no more than 10 percent like usual and still only go no more than 20 percent in on a particular security in case you wake up and that security is down 20-50 percent due to warrants exercised and offerings. But with a 20-50 percent loss, you are only looking at 4-10 percent loss on your total account with potential to earn 100-300 (20-60 percent increase of your account) percent on a nice consistent uptrend or breakout.  

Again, this will mean a lot less trading. The hardest part to this would be waiting for the price to come down and then waiting for the price to go up.  It will seem so slow and a lot less action. More watching. We are looking for stocks that have legit news, broke out, went through the cycles/stages of a stock, and are now at their lows. OPEN has already broken out.  But VCIG, AUUD, WOLF, MKZR, IXHL, SNGX, and ETHZ are a few that might be good buys before the breakout.  CGTX could still be uptrending, will probably retest that 2.8 high--but wonder if this is done uptrending or not ( it seems to be hitting the top part of the guides that are listed below).  IXHL already made a big move but could move more this week with FDA news (seems to be at the beginning stages on the charts listed below). The biggest one that I am looking at is SNGX. It already broke out 2 times in the past 2-3 weeks and is approaching that under 3 mark. 2.4-2.5 the best buy area here. Also, ETHZ is at a great buy zone! It was trading at 2.8-3.3 before the breakout and is there again. Any sniff of news and those shorts will get squeezed--htb now at 1000%.

Ok, I leave you with these pictures of the stages of a stock. This is very useful when trying to understand at what stage the stock might be at in order to determine good times to buy and sell. 

https://www.stopsaving.com/market-cycle-investing-guide/

https://tradebrains.in/stock-market-cycle-stages/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mastering-stock-trading-4-stages-sriram-balasubramanian

https://priceactionninja.com/wall-street-cheat-sheet-the-psychology-of-market-cycles/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1iy1u10/we_are_here/ (this says BitCoin; but it is the stages that I am referring to--not any particular part on the diagram)