Monday, May 7, 2007

Just plain discouraged

After finishing April strong and then starting May with 2 green days, I have fallen off a cliff. This is very tough to take.

March was my first negative month ever, April my second and I am in a good hole already in May.

The story of today is that I had no winners. I traded 16 stocks and had only 3 winners on the day, each of them small. I had no disastrous losers (although I barely avoided disaster today in TNH) just too many.

This game is so psychological and right now I am losing it.

I'm not going to over-analyze anything today. I almost think that I'm thinking too much. I'm going to try tomorrow to "just trade" again and let the chips fall where they may.

Here are the stats:

P&L: -$694
Best, HS $137
Worst, WCC -$243

shares traded, 39,400
stocks traded, 16, 3 winners, 13 losers.
total trades, 202

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

DT...when I was in Linda Raschke's chatroom she often talked about breaking out of losing streaks. One of the things that it is important to do...and I am in this boat...is drop your size way down and just focus on booking small profits. Build your confidence one brick at a time. It really does not matter how much you are making profit wise, the important thing is to start feeling like a winner again! This starts with one winning trade then another then another. Keep the losses as small as possible.

Dinosaur Trader said...

traderd,

She knows what she's talking about.

A few weeks ago, I did just that and I also only made sure that I added to winning positions. It took a few days, but things slowly began to work out. By the end of April, I had pared most of my losses for the month and ended with a couple of nice days.

May began with a couple of decent days and then, 3 bombs in a row. I increased my size a bit when I began to win again and that's when I got burnt. Perhaps I tried to move things along too quickly.

Today, I go back to square one. It's still early in the month.

Thanks for helping, traderd.

-DT