Weekly Review: 02-22-2015

Was down a lot this week. I didn't post on Thursday or Friday because I hit my max pain early Thursday and decided to take Friday off (still obviously had those swing positions etc) to clear my head and get in the right mindset. Derricks recent blog post is more or less identical to how I'm feeling right now: http://derricktrades.blogspot.co.nz/2015/02/the-setback-then-comeback.html

Was -$5869 on intraday trading, -$458 on swing trading, -$671 on SPI trading, and +$247 on FX.

To sum up how my weekly goals went. Focusing on entries has now become a secondary goal, I have improved on getting the right entries to an acceptable level, still nowhere near the level I would like to be, but sufficient for now, and will revisit it as a primary goal some point in the near future.

Some serious changes are required going forward, and like Derrick says, some soul searching. For me, the reality is that I need to focus on managing my risk and the size of my drawdowns (getting them to expected levels).

Honing in on specifics:
(1) I never have a problem cutting losses with reasonable position sizes, however recently I have been going for the big position size far far too much to hit the big one, and struggling with managing the losses on the large position size. So keep position sizes reasonable.
(2) I haven't been scaling into position, been starting in with full size. Almost always there have been higher confidence spaces to add later (say 10min-2 hours later, not 1 minute later).
(3) I have been focussing on nailing the big trade, so need to get back to the high probability grind trades. Risk $50-$100 to make $150-$500, rinse and repeat. Back to the grind.

I am going to trade on a demo for a day or two (or maybe more) for the first time in a long time just to prove to myself that I can control my risk. I am also going to pull back and only trade US stocks this week, just to hone in and focus.

So goals for this week:
(1) No individual losses exceeding $150, or no losses on any one share exceeding $300.
(2) Use starter positions for every idea.