leaving on vacation for two weeks
Soon, next week, I'll be leaving on vacation for two weeks, so I probably won't post until I come back in late May. I don't want anyone to worry that I may have committed suicide for these recent losses. It is indeed the most disastrous set of trades I've had in years, maybe ever since i started. But I'll never commit suicide because of blowing out my account. I always want to live to see if the systems will work or not. However, this is terrible. The EUR just kept on falling lower and lower, from 1.33 to 1.25, without ever bouncing back. This is really awful for someone looking for bottoms.
Not to suggest that there's any reason to be mad at the EUR of course: it's my methodology which is wrong. I wish this could at least cause my suicide/death as a discretionary trader, but even this last disaster will not be enough. I've been just as frustrated before, yet in a few weeks all will be forgotten, and i will be ready to implement more disasters. This is like smoking and other addictions. You can't just say "it was my last cigarette" and expect it to work. Every time someone quit, they say they suddenly quit, but there's many more times when someone says "this was my last cigarette" and it wasn't.
I know, this journal knows, that this is not the last time I ****ed up and not the last time I have blown out my account. There's no telling. Who knows. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Getting burned with trading has never been enough for me to wise up. At least I am not making the mistake any more of saying "never again", because it'd be bull****, as i've said plenty of times already.
As stupid as the maid
I guess we're all stupid in one area or the other. When it comes to (discretionary) trading, that's my stupid area. I am as stupid as the maid is at doing her job. I don't learn from my mistakes.
I went to the supermarket with her: we bought toothpaste, shampoo, and milk. I showed her specifically the products, the brands, how expiration dates work (she can read). After months of her buying the wrong milk, toothpaste... I had to do it. You show her the toothpaste, you tell her "buy this". She comes back with a toothpaste by the same brand, but different type of product. Retarded bitch.
Even after taking her to the supermarket, I stressed out to her, "don't buy wheatabix because i am soon leaving for two weeks and if you buy it be careful of the expiration dates". Yesterday she bought wheatabix expiring in 10 days, when I'll be gone, and i still half a box to finish. After three months, I am concluding she is stupid.
More stupid than any person I've ever met. After watching the chimp documentaries, I've considered bringing some sugar with me to train her.
Anyway, when it comes to trading, I am like my maid is with shopping: retarded, illogical, irrational, stupid, inefficient. The same mistake of doubling up on losers and keeping them open forever, the same mistake since 13 years ago. Maybe there's something in her mind that keeps her from thinking rationally about expiration dates. Maybe she sucked at math just like me, but even worse, and her mind turns useless when she is confronted with dates on a box. If that's the case, no wonder she is a maid and not an engineer. On the other hand, I see her as a chimp, but what do i do with trading? My mind stops working in the same exact way when i am confronted not with an expiration date, but with a loss.
Certain events stop our reasoning
Maybe it's from my childhood and my dad always criticizing me for doing anything less than perfectly. I've turned into a perfectionist and cannot accept the sight of a loss, which I see as my mistake. Basically, when i see a loss (no matter how small), i stop being rational. Yet the same happens in many other fields in my life and it must happen to everyone else in other fields as well.
I guess this is one way we could define our intelligence: the fewer the fields where our mind stops being rational, the more intelligent we are. My maid's brain stops functioning when she sees an expiration date: it just overeats and freezes, and she has to reboot but to no avail. My own brain stops working when I am confronted with what i perceive as a mistake, or maybe just a loss, a trading loss. Let's not generalize too much.
Other areas like this one for me?
My parents. I don't act rationally: I hold a grudge. I am vengeful towards my dad in particular. I won't act rationally. But maybe, because of not loving him that much, I am actually more rational that those who feel love and affection for their parents. In a way love implies ceasing to be rational.
Other areas? A girl of course, or rather, a woman. A woman I find attractive. I stop being rational once again.
A complex formula. Instead of trying to figure it out, I feel stupid, feel some phobia for it, and avoid it, run away from it. My mind goes blank. I refuse to even try to understand any complex formulas, those with sigma symbols for example.
Loud noises. If I hear someone slamming the door or laughing loudly, he bothers me so much that i hate him, and resent him. I feel like they're doing it to spite me. Anyone being loud. I feel like it's an aggression against me. Whereas it is not. The person doesn't even know me. But I feel like they're attacking me physically. This is a stupid reaction, just like my maid who keeps on buying almost expired milk and other products, even after she realizes they have to be thrown away.
Or as stupid as people who are not orderly and fill up their desktop with icons, so many that their desktop becomes useless. Or people who have their favorites all in one group, without any subfolders, which, after you have 100 favorites in there, makes them totally useless.
The only difference between my irrational behaviours in general and trading is that trading forces me to realize I am doing something wrong, like in a lab test. It hits me where it hurts most. And my financial balance is telling me this:
1) you think you want to make money
2) you think you can make money
3) but you do not make money
And therefore it raises these questions:
1) do you really want to make money?
2) can you really make money?
I have some possible answers:
1) Maybe i don't want to make money (and avoid losing money) bad enough to overcome my bad habits (pride and impatience), to which i am more attached than to money
2) I am not really sure if I can actually make money, because i do have an edge, but that edge disappears when i am upset or impatient, which tends to happen all the time, so maybe the answer is that I cannot make money, because there's too many negative impulses to control them all.
The conclusion is that I am incapable of trading profitably, for one reason (not hungry enough) or for another (too many impulses interfering). I should not do it. But the crazy thing is that I cannot even refrain from doing it, because I am forced to watch the markets every day because of my desire to at least make money with discretionary trading.
Once again, I can't promise anything and it would be ridiculous to say "never again..." after all the times I've said it. I don't know what I'll do: the easiest thing would be to quit discretionary trading rather than trying to do it right. However, even that seems to be too hard. There's a pressure in me to increase capital, and that pressure every once in a while makes me resume discretionary trading. To speed things up. Now it would be easy to say "never again" and to believe I have learned my lesson. But pretty soon, once i've recovered to a reasonable capital, I will do it again. It's happened too many times to still believe i can quit it. The situation has not changed over the years. I lose, I recover (almost always by wiring more money), i do it again. I've changed platforms, instruments, increased my knowledge, but i always lose at the same rate of blowing out several accounts per year. I used to blow out 2k dollars accounts and now i blow out 20k dollars accounts. I used to not be able to make any money and now I've been able to multiply my capital by as much as 5 times, before blowing out my account as usual.
I am tired of being myself, I would even say i will stop writing this journal. But i know i will feel like writing on it again in the future. And i know that I will feel like trading again in the future. I know i will do the same mistakes again. The mistake is not really making a given trade. At this point it's clear to me that my mistake is keeping my losses open, and even worse doubling up (tripling, quadrupling) on my losses.
Just like for compulsive gamblers, there's no end to this. I keep on making money at my job, and i keep on wasting it here. And now, for the first time in my life, I have blown out an account entirely made with money from a loan. But this won't change anything. Or maybe this lack of hope and despair i am feeling is the beginning of a change. But maybe not. 13 years. I would say the problem is getting more and more into focus. My technology is improving (server), my systems are improving (more systems, all forward tested, better understanding of money management), but I feel time is running out more and more and this makes me run out of money instead.
If I really feel restless, I should work long hours at my job. I should work a second job, to produce capital to invest. I should go swimming. Anything but discretionary trading, which actually decreases my capital, each and every time (in the long run). The rate is about this: 9 wins out of 10 trades, and the tenth trade blows out my account. Martingale madness basically, to sum it all up. With an unlimited capital you would never lose, but without it it's pure madness. Sooner or later, like in these days, there will be a EUR that goes down without ever looking back. It went down for 3 straight days. And obviously, just like with a coin toss. If you double up each time you lose, sooner or later if you run out of capital, you are screwed by the coin.
But this is not wisdom. All this will be wiped out in a matter of seconds as soon as I am trading again. I knew all this stuff even today, and yet i did it again. And i knew it 3 days ago. And a year ago. And all this time I've kept on losing by doubling up on losing trades. It is a perfect method for someone who doesn't like to lose .You win 9 times out of 10, and that last trade you blow out your account. I am so pissed off at the market when it proves me wrong, that I'd rather put my balls and my whole account on the line, than admit i might have been wrong. It will happen each time the market tells me i was wrong, and that will happen each time I place a few trades. So I cannot trade, because I will not change. I will always be a proud perfectionist and won't ever accept that I can make a mistake. So i cannot trade. But i will trade again, because the capital is low and the capital is low because i've been losing it all these years. There's no escape. All life pressures cause me to trade and the consequences add future pressure to my life and this in turn will cause more trading... endlessly. At least up to this very moment I have been in a
vicious circle.
Someone had told me on this journal to take a break for a few weeks if I didn't feel calm. I didn't listen to them. I told them there was no reason to take a break, because the systems were going to trade and not me, and taking a break was useless, because actually I would have wasted opportunities. The problem is that, little by little, i got cockier and started trading again... and it happened again: I tried to force the markets to give me money (by doubling up).
Now I still have some capital left, and what is it doing? Still trading one contract from this disastrous EUR trade. Probably, as soon as the EUR will start its bounce up, I will be satisfied and get out and miss most of the move. This is what happens with me. Take huge risks to be LONG exactly at the bottom, and when it happens, i get out almost immediately.
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