You need to take your time to assess what’s really going on. You need to be able to sit idle while determining what’s really going on. Then and only then, once you have a reasonable thesis, you need to act with a reasonably placed stop. By in large you traded poorly, in what you could have easily discerned to be chop. A reasonable pattern (reasonable because you ended up profiting from it meagerly? Check your biases) ended up presenting itself and you were able to capitalize on it a bit, but still ending up massively red on the day. One positive of this day is I’m not emotionally eviscerated—I feel I am able to contextualize the day for what it was, and I am still alive to approach the market again. But I must check this furtive confidence & consider that it may be unwarranted & only resulting due to my small comeback at the end of the day. I took far too many trades.
When I take a losing trade, I am immediately put on a slight tilt to try and make myself even again. This is only natural but you must not let it rage out of control, particularly when you are trading what is clearly a choppy market.
Your stops are often too tight, which is a double edged sword because there are often times it protects you. This is fine if you can cope with the emotional baggage that comes with such tight stops when things end up going your way. You need to decide one way or another. It’s probably best to stick with tighter stops for now, but you have to recognize and accept that you are going to get stopped out of what turn out to be good moves.
You did learn something positive today, what is that the Initial Margin for futures really is $15,823.50, meaning you can only trade 1 /ES contract at a time, which is probably best & will protect you from degeneracy. This also sets a goal for you to get the account to the first benchmark goal of $31,647 by whatever means necessary.