I finally caught up uploading my trades from the past two months.  I normally write a detailed description for every trade, but I kept getting more backed up until it seemed too big a task, and so finally decided to just bulk upload everything without descriptions.

Take a look at my profit chart.  It's wild, but I hope it can prove useful to newer traders, as it exemplifies a VERY IMPORTANT milestone that almost all successful traders must go through at some point in their career:  The overconfidence loss.  When you've reached consistent profitability and feel like you've "gotten it" and joined the ranks of successful traders, you're NOT quite there yet!  Once you start gaining momentum in your trading career, you will almost certainly become overconfident in your abilities and therefore stubborn with your trades, and at the same time become more greedy for big wins and therefore take increasingly large position sizes.  Everything will go well until you run into that ONE trade that just defies you no matter what, beyond all expectations, and you will not be MENTALLY ABLE to admit that you're wrong.

You'll hold past your risk level and tell yourself that you'll stick to the next risk level - multiple times.  When it starts really accelerating, you'll tell yourself that now you have to wait for that inevitable big pullback (or bounce if you're long) to cover, but when it starts pulling back you convince yourself that you'll wait for a few cents better, or maybe even it's finally reversed in your favor.  So you decide not to cover just yet, and before you know it the stock supports and starts squeezing back up, and you rinse and repeat this though cycle!  You'll probably add to get a better average, while the stock continues against you farther than you could ever imagine.  Eventually, you'll be staring at the biggest unrealized loss you've ever seen on your screen, and begin thinking about the implications this loss will have on your LIFE.  You may have cracked below the PDT limit, you may have to use your savings to refund your account, you may have to work another job for a while until you can refund, or possibly worse.  Whatever the case, you'll finally end up taking that loss, and both your account and your mind will feel the damage.

Even though I had already heard similar horror stories from multiple top traders and mentors (Tim Grittani, Tim Sykes, Nate Michaud, Gregg Sciabica, Alex Temiz, and more), I was still not able to avoid this happening to me in early April.  Trading discipline is SO DIFFICULT that all of these mentors' warnings did not sink in until this actually happened to me first-hand.  But I HOPE that if enough stories like this are shared, at least one newer trader can be saved from such a loss during his or her journey.

Note that the amount of money I lost in the first week of April wasn't the "entire loss".  I was scared and made very few trades for the remainder of April AND for all of May, and only with very small size and tight stops.  Not only had I wiped out my previous two months' profits, but I also wiped out potential profits for the NEXT two months by destroying myself mentally.  I finally began trading well again in June, and I'm just recently surpassing my previous highs in total profits.  But if I hadn't experienced that loss back then, certain lessons would never have hit home, and I would never have been able to take my trading to the next level (not that it's amazing now, but I definitely feel like I know more than I did before and am more disciplined).

The summer has been very slow, but I'm content with small profits knowing what happened last time I got greedy for big wins.  I will continue to trade to the best of my ability, and as the market picks up profits will follow.

I've said this before but I do want to become more active blogging etc. as I continue my journey.  Hopefully I my next post will be less than four months from now :)

Cheers and good luck!