Trading Review: 08-19-2015

Main Account: +$2383.

Back Account: -$46881.

The all famous "blow-up". To offer some perspective around the figures I am now down -3227 on my back account for the month, and up 13875 for the month on main account. So fortunately it's not the end of the world, as it potentially would be if I wasn't having a good month (although it's debatable whether it would have happened if I hadn't been having a good month - more below). Taking a step back; I am really happy with raw figures this month, and the general consistency. This is the first negative day on back account (out of 12), and have only had 4/13 days negative in main account; with the magnitude of winning days being substantially larger than losers.

So what actually happened today? Most blow-ups you hear about relate to contrarian trading and doubling down on a stubborn position. That is not the case here. Firstly (and important to note that large loss still occurs on both trades, these problems just amplified the loss), the brokerage account was having issues executing orders. This accounted for approximately 10-25c on each order; which equates to exaggerating the loss by about $10-20k.
The main problems were: putting on too much size, and being way too emotional. For quite some time I have been anticipating a float rotation long setup (given the large number of shorts that have been setting up) and was prepping myself to nail it long with size. For starters this led to fomo, ultimately causing chasing with far too much size and not locking anything in (being greedy on take profits). The trade idea/trade thesis on CLTX was exactly the same for my main account and my back account. However, notice that I made money on main account and lost substantially on back account. Ironically, the trade thesis on CLTX actually worked out and it did close near the high of day; but through sloppy execution I lost a lot of money.

To sum up, causes were:
(1) FOMO/Performance pressure.
(2) Chasing.
(3) Too much size all at once. Risk realised/unrealised PnL when ever put size on. Also was trading 3x the size I have on any of these other "high conviction setups". That's far too much of an increase. Should have been at most 1.5x.
(4) Not locking in profits. Both trades were up around 10-20k at some points. No reason not to take some off. In particular CRBP came into it's all time highs and I was only planning on getting out of 1/3... I should have been aiming to get out of min of 2/3s.

Solutions are:
(1) Was only slight methodology failure ( rather it was poor psychological execution of how it should be traded). General jist is that reads were absolutely fine. It was the failure to trade around the position. Namely, not locking enough in, and sizing in far too quickly. This is further backed up by the fact that I traded CLTX really well in my main account.
(2) Regular wiring out will ensure that my size doesn't increase dramatically in a short space of time. This is a slightly issue given the t+3 withdrawal times... But reality is that I will have to work around it.