If you keep losing trades, well that happens because of a couple of major reasons. Neither reason have anything to do with the market itself, it's all in your head! The best way to confront an issue in the trading world is to look in the mirror. In most cases, you are the problem.
Now I have preached about this before, and most of the time when you see me write about this subject, well, I probably lost money on a trade and I am kicking myself in the butt, but on a verbal level, lol. See, I do have a trading plan, and I even built an advanced indicator to help me with that plan. The problem is following the plan. This is my way of journaling the trade.
One thing that I am guilty of, including this morning, was breaking my rules. So, the way I day trade goes like this:
I set alerts on my indicator to alert me on when the coins I am watching fire off either a BUY or SELL signal on the 1HR timeframe. This tells me the short term trend is changing. I then go down into the 5 minute time frame and wait for the next signal that tells me to BUY or SELL. For this, sometimes you have to be patient, and right after 2 cups of coffee, I wasn't very patient this morning, haha.
Another rule is that I only trade with the larger trend. So if the 1HR is flashing a BUY signal, I am ONLY looking for LONG trades. So if we are in a BUY signal on the 1HR, I am down in the 5 minute time frame looking for BUY entries. Part of this rule, is that I do not enter as soon as the BUY or SELL signal flashes, I wait until the next candle and if it opens and moves higher, then I am in.
And then there is the risk factor... Set a stop loss and if the trade goes the wrong way, get out quick and lick your wounds, but you have more money to trade next time.
Well, I literally broke ALL of the above rules...
I got a BUY signal on ORDI/USDT which was the top of the biggest losers of the day, so I was looking at a reversal pump. So what I did is I got the signal on my phone and jumped on the computer to look at the chart. Well my biggest mistake was not going to the 5 minute chart for entry... Nope, I went all the way to the 1 minute chart because the 5 minute wasn't moving fast enough for me, lol.
So on the 1 minute chart, I was waiting on a pull back to reverse and got a BUY signal that flashed on the candle and the price started to take off. Well, I got impatient and opened a LONG using a market buy, which I didn't pay attention to the spread and started out down in the position due to slippage.
And just my luck, what happens? The damn BUY signal disappears as soon as I go in and the next candle reverses into a bearish direction and goes the other way.
The next stupid thing I did was assume it was still going to go up... So what did I do? Yep, you guessed it, I closed my stop loss to let the trade ride back the other way, like a freaking moron...
One lesson I learned the hard way is that on the exchange I trade on, I cannot trade both ways at the same time on the same asset... Nope... I tried to hedge my LONG trade by opening a SHORT. Why the hell did I do that you may ask? Well, because I was way over caffeinated and decided it was a good idea. Well I instantly regretted it when it closed my long completely and entered the short. At least I kept the stop loss there and got stopped out.
This is where you have to just stop for the day. I knew exactly what i did wrong, so when things like that happen, I have to just stop for a while a regroup. Take the lessons I learned in the loss, move forward and not let it bother me. This is where journaling your trades is so important. This gives me a change to get the mistakes I made out of my head, and out here on the table, and in this case on the blockchain. This allows me to have accountability for what I did and gives me my own reference to return to in the future.
So learn from my mistakes and make sure to not only make a trading plan, but stick to it! After this, I am going to seriously reevaluate how much coffee I am consuming in the mornings. The cups we have are huge, and I drink 2 cups, at least. Hell, just writing that tells me I need to keep it at one cup in the morning, lol. I really don't think I would have made those mistakes and lost the money I did if I wasn't so jumpy.
Trading makes you want to be the best version of yourself. So being balanced in your body and mind is the biggest part of it. So, in this I have taught myself that I need to slow my roll and get back to some meditation to calm my mind before I jump in the markets.
Let me know a time that you broke your trading rules and took a loss in the comments. Let's talk it out together!
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