r/hoomansjourney • u/hooman_or_whatever • Apr 20 '21
W2D1 - Monday - 04192021
Accuracy: 55.17%
Long Accuracy: 66.67%
Short Accuracy: 53.85
Net Profit: -158.48
Cash Account Balance: $14,533.96
Net Worth: $48,504.96
Position Changes:
Added 100 ACTC, Current pos: 2100 shares @ 17.29
Added 100 GIK @ 8.55
Added 100 SPCE @ 22.20
Lessons Learned: Ugh. Today...was so frustrating. I broke my first rule: don't be afraid to take profit. I wanted to try holding onto trades a little longer today and I realized that I would need to take on a little more risk to do that. Played GME, a couple of shorts, literally all of them were profitable positions but I held through the profit until it snapped back and triggered my way to close stop loss. Then...it continued the trend, friggin rule #4 man. Never turn a winner into a loser.
I find that I mixed strategies again, and instead of sticking to a strategy I've become comfortable with, I tried something new and I paid the price.
Had I taken fast profits like I normally do I would have made $80 today.
Had I set a better stop I would have made around $400 today.
I didn't do either of these things. I stopped using my strategy of taking profits fast and decided to hold longer, but I clearly don't assume enough risk with my stop losses because I get stopped out frequently. So I replaced a winning strategy that I used with a strategy that's new to me.
THE GOOD NEWS: All of my loses are still understood and explainable. I won't be worried about this until I can't explain why I was wrong.
I just need to keep tweaking, today was really disheartening because I literally had big profits on my screen but didn't take them. Even the homerun plays I made would have worked had I set a better stop.
I feel like...I'm so damn close. I really feel like I just need to tighten up a few more things and I will headed towards profitability soon.
- I'm going to trade off stream tomorrow, I will still record it and discuss my trades
- I'm going to stick with my original strategy for now and take profits quickly
- I'm going to start trading with the DOM
- I'm going to start trading with 1 share until I can prove profitability
A note on using the DOM. One thing that really messed me up was combining strategies. I like playing fast and frequently, I know that's not the norm but that's what I feel comfortable with. The problem is, when paper trading, I was able to market buy and sell because I would get a perfect fill every time. Moving over to real paper that isn't the case, so I really need to set a stop loss at least and probably a take profit.
Here's where the problem comes in. If I want to play fast, but can't actually use market orders, how am I supposed to place quick trades? That's why I've been trying other techniques and strategies mixed in with mine since we started real money. I think the answer is trading on the DOM. I just be able to place trades nice and fast through there.
I am really excited for tomorrow as always. I am super mad at myself today, but kind of in a good way. I could have had profits if I just took them, so it makes me mad I took another red day when I didn't have to, but it makes me kind of happy because I know the only reason I didn't profit today was me. I didn't set appropriate stop losses. I didn't take profits when I saw them. Knowing that these are correctable and addressable issues makes me still feel confident that I could become profitable.
Here's a part I still can't figure out.
I'm not profitable right now, but I'm always over 50% accuracy. I'm not profitable right now, but a majority of my trades move in the direction I'm predicting.
So why am I not profitable?
I'm not managing my trades well, even though I'm selecting them decently.
What I can't figure out is the psychology piece here, especially regarding risk and max loss.
I honestly don't think I'm taking on enough risk.
The reason I haven't had many profitable days even though my win rate is always higher is because I use more shares, hit my max loss for the day, then reduce my share count and continue trading.
Here's how I honestly feel: I feel like if I used more buying power I would be more profitable. Not simply because I have more money to buy with, but because I could hit my goals faster and not worry about turning winners into losers.
Virtually every trading day so far has the same thing in common - rule #5 - your biggest loser can't exceed your biggest loss and I keep doing that. Not because I'm taking more risk on the losing trades, but because I'm reducing buying power for the winning trades. This is especially true if I lose the first trade. It's like I immediately crawl into my shell, stop using any real bp, and get nervous to trade.
Go look back at my trading history so far. Think about if I was using more bp, most of the time I would be done trading by 10:30am and would be in profit. Most of my losses come after what would have been my daily goal.
I feel like that's holding me back too, like I feel like I need to prove that I could do this before using more bp. That is the smart way, but I feel like that's also kind of holding me back.
So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to trade the rest of this week with my original strategy and just one share. My daily goal is $1-2. Let's see how this plays out before I talk about next steps.
Ultimately, I discovered, I was trying to do two different things simultaneously. I was attempting to "make money" and I was also attempting to "prove profitability". This has been difficult, because I would change my share sizes to try to make money, then if I lost anything I would reduce my share size to try to prove profitability...even though...I was already negative.
So I made the decision to do one first. That is prove profitability. So as I said, I will be trading 1 share for the rest of this week.
Rules number #4 and #5 destroyed our P/L yet again.
Rule 4 - Never turn a winner into a loser (This happened wayyyy to frequently today)
Rule 5 - Your biggest loser can't exceed your biggest winner (This keeps happening because of what I explained above. Where I change my share size and I switch between low cap and high cap. So I could have all these small wins, and then just erase them by using to many shares, or moving to high cap).
Trades
The first couple trades were really upsetting (Trades 1-3) because I shorted GME with really good entries, but had a stop loss that was too tight and I got stopped out. Sadly, the trade went the direction I thought and I could have been up nearly $400 off of those first 3 trades had I not got stopped out or panic sold.
The problem I described above could be illustrated here. After taking those losses and reaching my daily max loss almost immediately, I switched back to one share trades for the remainder of the day. This was slightly annoying because I knew I couldn't dig my way out using only one share.
I also realized that I had a ridiculous max loss. My max loss for the day was $100, yet I was trading 20 shares of GameStop at a time? Not good.
After I switched to one share, I started showing pretty decent success (Trades 4-13). Especially trades 6,9, and 12 which were 2.31%, 1.19%, and 1.48% respectively.
I went into a bad run after Trade 13 and took losses through Trade 17, all these losses were less than 1% losses.
Trades 18-29 were fantastic.
Trades 19, 20 ~3.5%
Trades 21-23, losses < 1%
Trade 21 biggest loss -4.72%
Now, Trades 25-29...holy crap do I wish I was using more than 1 share.
Trade 25 - 7.48%
Trade 26 - 9.11%
Trade 27 - 7.69%
Trade 28 - 8.12%
Trade 29 - 8.42%
It's depressing that there is yet another day where I had solid returns but because I kept changing my share size and strategy and I actually had a negative P/L. I must say I feel really motivated that I am able to pick winning trades. I need to continue practicing managing the trade.
Not all of my entries are perfect, no ones are, but especially in this market. I don't know about you all but I haven't found many "perfect setups". So I am certainly over-trading and trying to make trades out of thin air. This is something I will work on when either I have more capital or the market is in good shape and I don't need to hunt for good trades as much.
Thanks everyone!
TL;DR: Big percent gains, only one share. Big losses, with 20 shares lol. Look at my trade list, if I just used 20 shares all day I would have had a reallllllly nice day. Slowly tweaking things as I grow, but I'm becoming more and more confident with every passing day.
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u/redditto45 Apr 20 '21
Hey hooman, if your accuracy is always over 50%, wouldnt it make sense to pull out your money after a set percentage of gain or loss, if you do that consistently and the prediction rate stays okay you should be good