Take what the market has to give!

My summary for this week is.... 8.5% profit in 3 days of trading.

This week started off nicely with a little win on Monday.  I then had a very busy day of work meetings on Tuesday with no break in between them.  Now I have learnt over time that I don't have the ability yet to just instantly switch into trading mode, I need time to mentally prepare.  Based on this I took the decision to not trade.  Yes I probably could have still made money but with out the right mental preparation there was a higher chance of potentially losing money.  And this game is all about probabilities!

Wednesday was then a rather choppy day.  I now know how to recognise this early in the session so I reduced my risk and contract size. However in hindsight I should have just left the markets alone as it was very difficult to trade.  The end result was that I ended up with a small losing day.  Thankfully I accepted that it was not a good day for trading before the losses got too big and called it a day.  If I am being brutally honest I probably knew that I shouldn't have traded but not trading for 2 days in a row is a hard thing to accept when you want to make money.  Clearly an area I need to work on, but equally something I am improving on slowly.  It's part of the ongoing mental battle of wanting to be out there trading vs accepting the conditions won't always be right.

Thursdays I then don't trade as I am in the office.  Friday was again a pretty brutal day at the market open with the ES moving 3 or 4 pts in a matter of seconds at times. I did manage to get 2 relatively low risk trades in with 1 winner and 1 loser giving me a net 5.5 pts on 2 contracts.  Not a bad day if I say so myself.  Given how quickly the markets were moving and reversing though I didn't feel like taking any further risk and called it a day 15 minutes into the market open.  This ended my week with a 76 dollar profit so I'm now up to $965 in my account from a start of $500, I'm so close to doubling my account I can almost touch it ......

The most important thing I learnt the hard way this week is that sometimes the best thing to do is to not trade.  Whether that is because mentally or physically you are not in the right head space or because the markets are just too risky.  No trades is much better than losing trades.  Hey, if you don't take a trade then it's impossible to lose!

Until next time...