My second weekly dump of daily post-trading day thoughts. This week was worse than last. I absolutely know I must educate myself more before I come back at it Monday. Half of my losses are due to huge, preventable mistakes, and half of them are due to what is clearly a lack of skill. I can't chalk them up to bad luck.

Monday, August 17 - Halfway through day: I am in limbo and down $500 today as TDAmeritrade's ThinkOrSwim platform was been down all day. It's disastrous for all users. All of my losses today are due to delays in being able to look at real-time info.

Over the course of the afternoon, I cobbled together a trading day from brief moments of the TOS working ok and then just using the website. It was far from ideal.

Early frustrating trades: ($538)
Later in day: $271

Net: ($267)

 

Tuesday, August 18 - Struggled to come back to breakeven after two early bad trades, but then I rode a wave, a crazy, crazy wave

GRNQ
Buy x200 @2.06
Sell x200 @2.70

+$1289.60

But then I felt like I had casino house money to play with, and I kept playing GRNQ, and I could've potentially lost a lot of my gains. But, ultimately, I didn't.

"At 2:20PM, I find myself up $1500 for the day, and I know I should take a break...
but...I'm continuing on, because I'm doing well, trying to take less risks though..."

Up to +$1800

And then I lost it all and wound up down..

Because of a Google Sheet formula issue where I didn't extend my SUM function down far enough! I thought I was still up $1000 when I was really only up a couple hundred. (And I hadn't been paying attention to TOS's P/L metric which I now know is so handy.)

Sickening swing, just sickening. I had $1800 in profits I could have taken. But I thought I could keep playing that same stock all day

"2:20pm - 3:40pm - HORRIBLE"

First two bad trades plus the greedy misadventures with the one stock after I should've taken my profits and stopped: ($2300)
Everything Else: $2200

Net: ($93)

 

Wednesday, August 19 - Today is a day as bad as any other, for the reason that I have no excuses today. The platform wasn't broken. I didn't make any glaring mistakes. I didn't lose impulse control. I just made about 30-40 trades that were mostly negative. I lost $50-100 many, many times. Most of my bets were wrong. I guess the only answer, if I want to continue, is more learning.

I didn't have a list of stocks to look at going into today, since I've previously found those lists to not be helpful. Looking at TOS lists of what's got news/action has seemed to work better. Anonymous stocks seem better than pre-picked stocks.

But maybe I need more of a plan.

Net: ($703)

 

Thursday, August 20 - More losses, more lessons learned. Made 65 trades that I made $400 on...but then made 7 trades that I lost $1000 on. One mistake was a few trades with too high of a loss tolerance. The other mistake was running with a tip a half-hour late. The tip would've been great if I had taken it right after it was offered. And I did the thing I keep telling myself not to do, chase it.

I have developed a strategy that can work, that can make $400-500/day if I don't make any mistakes.

The 7 mistakes: ($1106)
The other 65 trades: $483

Net: ($622)

 

Friday, August 21 - Today was the worst of the last few days. I lost a lot on chasing one stock, again. But that was just half of my heavy losses. The other half of my losses consisted of dozens upon dozens of small losses. But I know the greater issue is that I have no strategy beyond a general one of hitting stocks when they exhibit one of a few patterns. I'm sure I'm entering positions either before the patterns are fully formed or too long after they have formed. I clearly don't have the skill to time trades correctly. My trailing stops are working well. But I need to study a lot more if I'm going to go back and try this again next week. I'm clearly in over my head. But I haven't given up yet, despite feeling gutted right now.

1 bad stock: (760)

Other: (779)

Net: (1539)