End-Of-Year-Review Year Two 2021

Regaining Patience

One big problem I am experiencing is not executing at a high enough level once in a trade, mismanaging numerous trades to my own detriment both in real capital and mental capital. Currently, I’m mismanaging about 44% of my trades each week, and while I normally overcome these issues with good trades, it is impacting me in other areas of my trading in negative ways.

If I’m mismanaging trades, it reduces the trust in myself, which then prevents me from sizing up further, which then causes me to trade more to “make” just as much with lower lot sizes as if that has ever worked for me in the past, then I overtrade, lose money and we all know that song and dance.

Improving my trade management has been tricky, I was trying all of August & September to improve but I still was not performing at the level I needed to. It is odd because I can’t recall another time in my life that I’ve given so much to something and I’m still not able to improve on-demand or over time at a rate I find satisfactory. It is also odd that my biggest issues don’t revolve around technical analysis, I think a lot of us traders think if we just understood technical analysis like Al Brooks, we’d all be millionaires… but that’s absolutely not the case. It’s more than that, it’s about clearing the mind, stabilizing the emotions, or at the very least, masking destructive internal dialogues/issues that trading brings to the forefront even when we aren’t cognizant of it.

Right now, I’m focusing on improving my trade management, being more selective in my trades, trading less, and sizing up.

To overcome my lapses in trade management, I buckled down in mid-November to adhere to my rules more zealously. As my rules prevent me from mismanaging trades 95-99% of the time, and it is a simple solution. The results confirmed my solution is working when I followed those rules religiously as I did from Nov.13th – Nov. 24th, the problem is if I don’t follow those rules, it doesn’t matter. And, even though I’ve been pretty disciplined in trade selection, the discipline inconsistency in my trade management persists. I just have to bring this issue to the top of the list, and focus on it alone until it is solved.

My trade selections are pretty good, I normally operate above 85% in this area and will continue to work that up into the 90 percentiles, but it isn’t my biggest issue. A simple solution for that is just adhering to Grade-A setups, eliminating all shit trades, and just letting the other non-Grade-A set-ups go, sure there are opportunities there, but at this point in my journey, they aren’t worth the risk. Over the past 18 weeks, I’ve averaged about 21 trades a week, whereas in the previous 34 weeks I was averaging over 34 trades a week, way too many.

Sizing up has been fun, I thought this might cause me the most problems, but I’m actually enjoying this process, increasing 3-5x from my old size. I will continue to size up if the results dictate I should. I did however have a lack of confidence in sizing up to my biggest size yet and instead cut the lot size right before placing the trade. It could have been intuition telling me now isn’t the time, or I could have just chickened out, which will mean more work to do in this area. I’ll try again on a great set-up and see if those same tentative feelings creep back in or if I can push through and size up for a significant trade.

This brings me back to my title for this review, “Regaining Patience”. I’ve fallen back in love with the strategic aspects of trading. Being patient for the right opportunity, waiting for the most optimal moment to enter, and being okay without being in a trade every day. At points, I embraced this part of trading but the urge to make money, trade more, and try to reach that next level of trading had me lose touch with that aspect of trading and it hurt my performance because I wasn’t detached from the outcomes. I’m glad I found peace again with that part and have ditched the ‘wanting to succeed now’ dialogue I had going on in my head, as always, it will come when it comes.

I’m hungrier than ever, more disciplined than ever, and more excited than ever!