I just made my 23rd trade after studying quite a bit and thinking that I was doing ok-ish... To date, I had mixed results ranging from $800 up to over $800 down. I always post my trades here to keep the track of what I do.

Yesterday I entered another trade knowing that PDT rule won't let me leave in case it goes against me, and guess what... I'm down 1k so far and I'm forced to hold over a weekend... scary... but hey, there's nothing better than a lesson learned the hard way...

I'm grateful for this lesson because it made me wonder what is wrong with my trades and so I decided to go back and review every one of them in detail. All my commentary was here so the only missing piece was the chart... sounds simple right, but it took me roughly 4 hours to get the exact execution times entered onto charts because I did not save them after trades.

What I found looking at the charts is scary on one hand and funny on the other... The scary part is that ALL of my entries are rather random, even on the winning trades... The funny part is that I really thought that I was doing ok :)

and NO, I was not doing ok at all... I was choosing right stocks (most of the time) but my entries were terrible, TERRIBLE! And I ignored rule number 1 most of the time... 

Let's look at some examples:

Exhibit 1 - Best $ amount trade to date:

Funny thing about this trade is that in my comment I said "my first sniper-like trade..." whereas, in reality, it was a rather random entry that I based on looking at L2 action, which we know is not an exact science and is highly manipulated... Anyway, a perfect entry would be just at or above the previous high after morning spike and I guess I got lucky here...

Exhibit 2 - worse $ amount trade:

What an ugly entry... yak... and the averaging down! ridicules!... perhaps if I was short-biased the entries would be quite alright, but since I was long-biased my entries were again random and I got what I deserved.

I'm not going to lynch myself publicly anymore. The two examples above should give you a gist of how bad of a trader I was... I say I was because now, having reviewed my trades I know exactly what I was doing wrong, and I'm not going to make the same mistakes again.

For now, less trading and more study is my strategy! And from now on my trading journal is going to be VERY detailed with all charts saved after the trade is closed.