The Goal I Am Focused Most On
Passing my TFD accounts
Highlights / Wins To Celebrate
- Progress in TFD accounts
- I am 86% through with one assessment and 28% with another.
- One of them is only $772 away from passing. I know it shouldn’t matter to me because I should focus only on taking good trades and managing my risk, but it’s nice to know the finish line is within striking distance.
- I created my real time trading overlay/dashboard to help track personalized goals
- It’s nothing fancy (screenshot below), but it does open up possibilities. As I take trades, my dashboard sits on the bottom right of my screen and I can keep track of what I’m making for the day and my progress towards my daily goals. I can also set weekly goals. There are some bugs I’m working through, but it is all very exciting for me since I am not a programmer.
- My goals on the dashboard are currently monetary focused. However, I could even set R:R and win rate goal and track them. The neat thing about something like this is that it can be personalized to what is important to me. Down the road, I want to add longer term milestones to motivate myself.
- I don’t think I’ll ever need a paid trade journal website. I can build something that is personalized to me. I can export my trading statistics from my platform, move it to a personal database, and build out my own reports. I already started on this, and I have my calendar view, equity curve, my R:R, Win Rate, a few MAE/MFE stats. Down the road, I want to automatically tag my setups so I can filter my trading stats by setup.
Lowlights / Things To Work On
- It was honestly a rough trading week. I had those trades where I would enter, and it would immediately go against me, hit my stop, and then reverse in my favor. I also had one where it touched my take profit, I wasn’t filled, then it reversed all the way down to my stop loss… then went back to my take profit. I was taking it personally! It felt like the market was coming after me. I know it wasn’t.
- I find that being close to any fixed profit target gets me to rush. This happened on Tuesday actually. I just needed one more base hit day to finish my assessment and ended up hitting my daily loss limit instead. That made me trade even worse on Wednesday, and I had to dig myself out of the hole on Thursday and Friday. I need to let go of that profit objective to pass next week. I should be trading the market, not my account balance and not my P&L.
Top Lesson
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
I watched F1 the Movie recently. It is the one with Brad Pitt as a Formula 1 driver. It was a fun movie and I recommend it. There is a line he says, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” that stuck with me.
As fast as I want to go with my trading, it causes me to lose control at times. On the other hand, there are days and weeks where everything kind of slows down for me and my trading. It feels easy and it feels smooth. Everything would run so smoothly that I would find myself suddenly ending my day early.
This is just a reminder that often going slow in trading can make the ride smoother (the equity curve). A smooth equity curve can sometimes get us to the finish line faster than when we try to rush it. My job is to not crash, and get to the finish line.
Trading Week Grade
It was a B. I had a good week overall, but it was definitely not smooth.
I had one of those weeks where I made money, but I would have been basically better off just trading Monday only. I went into a steep drawdown on Tuesday and Wednesday, and spent Thursday and Friday digging out of it. I basically ended up where I was at the end of Monday. I was for sure rushing on Tuesday to pass.
I’m glad I was able to pull myself out of the drawdown.
