Monday 10th May 2021

Had a frustrating trade on the 15:50 at Ffos Las today. Backed ladder two to come in and it went a few ticks against me. Even though all the qualifying signals where still present, I did what I thought was the right thing and closed the trade for a loss. Literally as I did that, it came steaming in. I’m not even sure if I still did the right thing, attempting to cut my losses short. If it had kept drifting out I would be giving myself a pat on the back. Can’t win them all. One of the harder aspects of learning how to trade is being able to take a loss exactly the same as you would take a winner and don’t beat yourself up about it. An even harder aspect in my opinion is figuring out if the loss was the right thing to do as in this case, I should have hung in there as all the signals told me to and ultimately I made the right call. But how many times do you have to ‘hang in there’ on losers to completely wipe out any potential profits on the day.

Another big loss on the 16.10 at Lingfield. Traded ladder one twice thinking I read the signals correctly. Will need to review this one at some point. I screen record all my trades for this purpose. After making a profit on all trades yesterday its like I’m back to square one. Or more like square -5.

I trade with £50 stakes and sometimes change it to £10 stakes to feather in my closing positions at various odds. Sometimes I forget to set it back to £50 and end up putting £10 into the market as my opening position. I really need to get into the habit of changing it back to £50 as soon as I have put my closing trades on. At the 16:25 at Windsor it actually saved me as this was yet another losing trade but much smaller than it should have been as I went in with a £10 stake. Actually, it annoyed me a little as I would have preferred a true record of my losses so I can more accurately assess my performance. That might sound silly but I’m playing the long game here. I’m not really interested in my P&L just now, rather my ability to read the market and to interpret that information correctly in order to execute a trade properly. The execution seems a skill in and of itself, it seems like even if my market reading skills where top notch, at my current ability I’m not sure I could still turn a profit consistently. I may be wrong here but that’s my current thinking. I’m going to try and give some thought to trade execution in isolation of anything else and try and figure out a way if it can be practiced on its own. Not sure that’s possible, but I’ll at least give it some though. Sometimes improvements can be made just by mulling things over.

Anyway, hopefully I have fixed the issue with not being able to read my P&L in the picture at the top. At least then something will have gone right today.