Now i want to write about my problem No. #1 which is "costing" me a lot of money.
Many, many times i don`t give the trade enough time to really develop itself. In other words - i am not sticking to my original plan.
When i enter into a trade many times my goal is to make 30-50 cents/share or at least 20-25 cents/share but somehow when i am already in the trade i get this strange feelings and i start to think about negative things which can happen and because of that i take my profits waaay to soon and i am leaving a ton of money on the table.
I have found that my entries are many times very good or even perfect (long and short) and than the stock goes into my direction and everything is fine but when the stock has the first struggle to go higher and starts to pullback a bit i get nervous and many times i sell out my entire position for a small profit. 1, 2, 3 minutes after i have already sold my position the stock starts to uptrend (considering i was long) and it goes much higher from where i sold and many times the stock reaches my goal of 30-50 cents/share but unfortunatelly without me in it.
Because of this problem my trading profits are not much bigger than my losses and this is probably the main reason why my account is not growing as fast as i want.
Regarding losses i can say that i am very proud about my risk management because i ALWAYS cut my loss when the stock does not do what i want. You can see that i have already made almost 1000 trades and out of that 1000 trades my biggest loss was about $210. Keep in my mind that my account is 30k so having worst loss of $200 is nothing to someone else... But it is true that i keep my positions small and i don`t go into a trades with 50% of my account...
Anyways .... I am 100% sure that if i am going to work on this problem and give the trades more time (be more patient) my profits are going to be 2 or even 3 times bigger than my losses on average and that`s why i am writing about that because i want this to go into my head, blood and inside my subconscious so nextime when i am going to buy or short a stock and it will go my way i am going to stick to my original plan and i am going to give the trade enough time to develop and made more profit and not just 30-40 bucks on average which is pathetic.
Below i have posted some screen shots of my trades. Those are just some examples of many trades where i have taken profits way to quickly. Trades are from long and short sides:
LONG TRADES:
1. CAPN
2. REFR
3. CCIH
SHORT TRADES:
1. CNAT
2. JUNO
3. NERV
4. WATT
5. JUNO
6. TKMR
7. FTR
8. MTSN
9. GERN
10. CRIS
11. CRMD
12. GMAN
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO EVERYONE AND SUCCESSFUL TRADING! :)
ShayneL, yes i am weak at buying breakouts and many times i am cought in a fakeout breakout so i have to reduce the number of trades where i am buying breakouts.
Especially mid-day.
great post thanks; I think your situation is very common in trading. I know it well. What works for me is put a well defined stop and then walk away from the trade and let it develop as planned, until I have gained control over my unhelpful thoughts (" it's not doing what I want" , "it's going to wrong way" , " I don't want a loser" etcetera haha, then I go back and watch it pann out...I can never learn how to trade my plan if I cover before the plan is done right?;-). Good luck!
Guidoantonio great comment, thanks. I am sure going to work on this! I am not going to post pictures of every trade when i have left a lot of profits on the table but i have just imported trades from yesterday and you can see how i have bought VLTC @ 3.11 and sold @ 3.30 already and the stock went all the way to $4.50... I have sold into first little weakness altought my goal was to make 30-50 cents/share.
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