This time last year I was struggling. I had a 4 month old baby and a semi blown up account. Needless to say, I was under a lot of stress and had to take a step back to realize this was not a conducive environment for trading...especially trading the way that I had been the earlier part of that year. This is the first blog post that I have written so in order for all of this to make sense, I need to back up and lay out my trading style. 

I have been consistently profitable at varying degrees since 2016. All of my trades are uploaded here so if you are curious, check them out. I was lucky to find a pattern that fit my personality early on in my trading career and I basically traded nothing but that pattern for years, with the occasional venture outside my lane to a different setup. What I have found in doing this is that I tend to treat new patterns in a similar manner as the pattern that I know well and have history with. Thus, I tend to get frustrated when they do not work out as I thought that they would and I drop them before I have had a chance to properly develop them. My personality is one in which I do not like losing and therefore I have a setup with a fairly high win rate and a low risk/reward. Many of my trades are 1 to 1 risk reward but the win rate is around 70 to 80% and so the math ends up working in my favor. 

It was on one of these jaunts outside of my comfort zone setup that got me into trouble last year. I started to mess around with options...Not just options but near dated slightly out of the money options. The bad part was in the beginning, with the market making new highs every day, my options plays tended to work. I then hit a point where I started to go in bigger and not fully understand what I was doing. This was followed by a string of huge losses around the July timeframe  last year. This coincided at a time when I had taken money out of my trading account to pay taxes and some other life expenses. Those things, paired with a string of large losses left me basically starting from scratch.

So, I had to dig myself out of quite the hole and I was back under the PDT so it was not going to happen quickly. The moral of the story however, is that this forced me to get back to basics. I started trading only the one pattern that allowed me to find success in the first place. Slowly but surely I built my account back above the PDT and to all time highs on my equity curve. Two years ago I would look at the amount that I made trading this year and laugh because it is small compared to where I was at during that point - however I feel better about the future now than I did at that time. Mainly because of the bad habits I have been forced to correct over this time period. 

The bad habits - 

1.) Getting bored and trading random setups

2.) Not stopping out and getting stubborn in trades that I have no business being in

3.) Taking too big of size in relation to my account size

There are more, however these are the ones that come to mind immediately and the ones that I have tried to work on. 

The reason I wrote this is to stress the one thing that every new trader struggles with and that is find a pattern that works for you and trade nothing but that pattern. You can use other trader's feedback and advice to find the pattern in the beginning but once you find it have the discipline to cut out everything else. Also you pattern should fit your personality. Are you the type that can take loss after loss in a disciplined manner until you are on the right side of the trade? can you let your winners ride even with a big unrealized profit staring at you in the face? These are questions that must be asked and answered.

Even traders that have been doing this for awhile and have had some success, only branch out when you are ready to go back to square 1 and put in the work to truly find a new setup. I have been humbled many times over the years, this is the latest time but there have been many more. And I am sure that there will be more in the future as I have so much more to work on as a trader (including the list above that I am still working on and probably always will be working on). For instance, sizing up. This is something I have struggled with my entire career and not something that I will get into in this post but a topic I will write about at some point in the future.

I will end with this, to anyone out there that is going through a tough time either in life or trading or both - just keep going. Get back to what you know best and stick to only that until you can build a base again. The key is to live to fight another day and the longer you survive, the higher the likelihood that you will succeed. It is not easy, but it is definitely worth it.