Subscribe Feed (RSS)Chop and INTC
January 16th, 2008 by eyal | Filed under Day Trading. |
Print This Post
The drawdown continues today. Partly due to some more mistakes and partly due to choppy market conditions. I shorted INTC, one of the stocks not on my shortlisted candidates. I scratched it and then re-entered but it didn’t work and I was stopped for -0.8R. Had I gone with my original list I would have come out with an R or 2 in the positive.
I think I know what the problem is though. After realizing something was wrong yesterday I paid more attention today to not just the information in front of me but also to how I was approaching things. I was trying to compare it to previous periods of time. I think what the problem is is that I over-analyze trades now and try to get a perfect trade going while in the process missing out on good ones and focusing on wrong aspects of candidate selection. I keep a record of my start of day candidates so I can go back and look at them, the mistakes over the last few days were mostly marginal but yet had a strong impact. In the past, during the best times I would just fire away several trades on a number of half-decent candidates and then manage those trades from there. These days I tend to focus on just 1 or 2 stocks and that involves high risk of picking the wrong ones. I suspect part of the problem is the fact that my R size is at an all time high since November (yes, it’s not nice having a drawdown with a relatively large R) and that may be contributing to the change in style.
It seems like every few months or so I get myself into this sort of situation, it happened around April and (kind of) around September last year. Just to put things in perspective the current drawdown is -7.22R, not that significant from a statistical point of view. What I intend to do is reduce my R size a bit again and try to get back into the same trading mode I was in before the end of last year. And if that fails.. well, I’m going to make sure it doesn’t.
If that fails, well, you can always make money selling som-tam on the streets :-)
Selling SomTam? No way.. too much work, maybe fried meatballs is better :-)
I’m sure it’s just a temporary drawdown, sometimes I lose sight of perspective, losing 7Rs isn’t nice but I used to have -4R in one single day just half a year ago so so far it’s just a small blip. I’m also working on another, different, automated system to add and diversify my risk a bit.