"Mindfucked" By DSL

I hit my limit today, right before the market bounced hard from the bottom. It's 3:07 right now and I'm just watching everything go straight up.

I'm pissed.

Here's a good trading rule to abide by:

If you're losing money trading 300 share lots, you'll lose 10x as much trading 3000 share lots.

That's where discipline comes in.

What happened today is that I came into the day all out of sorts because DSL was gapping down and I was long 300 in my swing account.



I'm out of my position at a loss of $1800+. That smarts.

So that more or less fucked with my head. I felt like I had to "make it back." Instead, all I did was dig myself deeper. I lost another $600 daytrading DSL. So for the day, swing and daytrading accounts combined, my grand total loss in this stock was $2400.

This is the first time that I've taken a big loss in my swing account and let it bleed over into my daytrading. I need to keep those two accounts mentally separated. I think that's very important.

Besides DSL, the rest of my day was awful too. Because I was trying to "make it back" all day, I was overtrading and trying to manufacture gains where there were none to be had.

In short, I sucked today. Plus I have some weird neck injury. And now, a phantom limb problem... despite the fact that I'm not an amputee.

I'm going right back into slump mode. Since Thursday of last week I've dropped about 4 grand. So for the rest of the week I'm going to follow trading rules very tightly and practice patience. I'm still up for the month, so I don't want to get myself too mindfucked right before earnings season begins. I can still have a very good month if I isolate the stupidity to the last few days.

Also, Judy taught her first (regularly scheduled) yoga class for kids today. Right when she left (when I went into babysitter mode) I built a few short positions in the shippers which promptly reversed. I just wasn't able to be attentive enough to get out of the positions in time and they pushed me over the edge.

Now the market is going straight up... I bet it closes positive. Shoot me... a reversal day and I'm watching from the sidelines. Meanwhile, volume is pathetic, especially for a reversal day. That's just odd.

Tonight I'm going to do something I don't normally do... drink beer and watch the Islanders beat up on the Rangers. Perhaps if I drink beer and watch sports it will get me in the proper mindset for trading...

Here's the stats:

P&L, -$1206
Best, ANW $289
Worst, DSL -$596

41,800 shares traded.
15 stocks traded, 5 winners, 10 losers.
156 trades.

UPDATE: The market mostly topped out when I was writing this post. Since I really felt it was going "unched" it tells you how off I was today. Thank goodness I stuck to my loss limits.