First trade, was in bathroom, saw what I perceived to be ‘Head & Shoulders’ type price action on 1m (seeds of my mistake here) hurried back to enter, saw drop manifesting & thought it may have more room to go. Got in, price moved down a bit but then pushed back up. The mistake here clearly was that I was not watching the larger time frames, in part because I didn’t want to have all the charts pulled up to be watching them & because I was in a rush. This is avoidable, you must reference all the charts and be cognizant of staying with the larger trend on the larger time frames.
Second trade, after stopping out of the loss on the first, decided to just go with the trend & got in the opposite direction. For whatever reason there is considerable demand continuing to push the price upwards. The price action on the daily is bouncing between channels, so I went with the assumption that we were still heading up towards the top line of the channel. This proved to be prescient enough. Rode the trend up & kept a relatively tight stop below the most recent $5 integer. Lesson here, is that $5 integers are where levels are, and even if its not always the case, it is enough of the time that it’s worth using those levels as arbitrary stop points. You could have salvaged a bit more profit out of this trade if you had followed a candle closing rule below the most recent $5 integer which would have been $4325. You got out close enough to that at $4323.5, giving the trade some room to work itself out, but you protected yourself and made up for all of the losses of the first trade and then a bit more.
Third trade was well taken and then well blessed with luck. Price action looked considerably weak, just the shape of the sell of seemed to communicate that a dump was coming (I say this all in retrospect of course, but I’ve seen this type of price action before, where dumps manifest, and this time it did play out.) I had the added reasoning that we were hovering at a reasonable strong hourly level, but also that we were touching the top channel lines & were likely to reject from this point. Reject we did, and I entered right before wat turned into a beautiful 30 point dump, the largest move I’ve been in to date. I held through this fallout & resolved to set my stop 1 point above the massive daily 4300 level that price had broken through. What I should have done was held fast to this newfound $5 integer level setting and placed my stop at 4295. It was unreasonable to expect that after such a selloff into what was easy to see would be a considerable area of demand, a psychological 100 level with additional historical significance, but my rationalization at the time was that we’d seen a significant break through the level and that there was more room to the downside on the daily chart, looking at the gap between the channel lines. Got stopped out as price bounced up from 4300 level, but it got as low as 4292.50. Should have taken profit at 4295.
Fourth trade was unnecessary, but I decided that, having some profits to play with and having thoroughly exceeded my monthly goal, I’d take the chance of getting back in for downside continuation. I should have flagged myself realizing that this was a FOMO trade, instigated in part by my frustration of having missed out on a healthy chunk of profits that I could have had from the last trade. Again, should have exercised caution at what was clearly going to be a significant demand zone (4300) but I shorted again with a stop 5 points above my entry of 4298.25. I was stopped out and the ES continued up considerably further. This trade was well done in that I had a reasonable thesis, plan & I gave the trade enough room to potentially work out, basically resolving that any meaningful push back above the significant 4300 level invalidated my premise. But still, I could have anticipated & avoided this, if anything, taking the opposite direction with the premise of this significant demand level not likely to be washed out in one fell swoop.
Overall ended the day ahead, though with a bitter taste in my mouth from the last trade. A good insight into how even with a win, trading poorly can still leave me feeling frustrated, thus robbing me of all the fruits of my labor. Profit is one fruit, but when I trade well & end well another fruit is the satisfaction of doing so, this should be given consideration. Thinking ahead to what I might feel like should I lose on trades even if I’m still in profit should be part of my process when entering trades. One, determine if the thesis for the trade is reasonable; is sound. Two, consider what you will feel like with either outcome. If the negativity of loss will be greater than the positivity of gain, reconsider taking the trade.
