my journal

[wprins]

Thanks, I will read it and comment on it after my bath.

It's maybe a bit blah-blah-ey in retrospect... but anyway.

 

[Yamato]

Bath tub intuition: 0.0100s as pivot lines beyond S2 and R2

Change to the system. Considering the fact that today it bounced on 1.4500 and that it will do it again in the future, and that this level is more important the more overbought and oversold we are and the less it's been touched today and yesterday (ideally never), I am creating this new rule:

Beyond s2 or r2 (like today) 0.0100s work exactly as pivot lines. By 0.0100s I mean 1.4500, 1.4600 and similar.

Accordingly, here's the new system:

HOTKEYS
"B" for "buy 1 at market" with 20 ticks bracket order
"S" for "sell 1 at market" with 20 ticks bracket order
----------------------
CHARTS
SET UP THESE CHARTS ON IB'S TWS:
15 MINUTES OF ES, CL, GBP, ZN "line" mode
2 DAYS OF EUR.USD@IDEALPRO 15-minutes CANDLES WITH PIVOTS
4 HOURS OF EUR.USD@IDEALPRO 1-MINUTE CANDLES WITH 15-periods and 210-periods moving averages
----------------------
RULES
ENTRIES must be made if:
1) time is 15.00 to 20.00 CET
2) your entry and your take profit are > 10 ticks away from any pivot lines or any 0.0100s levels if beyond S2 or R2
3) you're checking "correlated" chart for exact timing of entry
4) the 225-period ma is in favor by > 10 ticks
5) the 15-period ma gets crossed by price (in favor) after being on the other side >= 4 minutes
EXITS
Bracket order of 20 ticks.

 

[Yamato]

It's maybe a bit blah-blah-ey in retrospect... but anyway.

I've watched a part of the video and read his post, but with my short attention span, I failed him because he failed to appeal to me within the first 1 minute of attention I paid to him.

Thanks for the link, though, and please keep posting, at least for the others, who have a longer attention span. I do judge a book by its cover, or by its table of contents at the most.

 

[Yamato]

More work on Market Depth

Ok, here's what I am doing on market depth.

Very simple... so to speak, because it took me years to get all this stuff together. Hey, who put this thing together? Me, that's who. Who do I trust? Me.

So, here's the code under the excel sheet:

Private Sub worksheet_calculate()
    On Error Resume Next

If Cells(26, 12) > Cells(25, 15) Then
Cells(25, 15) = Cells(26, 12)
Cells(25, 16) = Now
End If

If Cells(26, 12) < Cells(27, 15) Then
Cells(27, 15) = Cells(26, 12)
Cells(27, 16) = Now
End If
End Sub

And here's what it does:



1) You create a simple function that subtracts, from the CUM SIZE of all ten BID levels, the CUM SIZE of all ten ASK levels.

2) You then use the macro to print on the same excel sheet the highest positive value and its time, on top (green cells). And the lowest negative value and its time, on bottom (red cells).

My hypothesis is that once I gather data for a few hours, those record values should correspond to rises for the highest positive value (a lot more bids than asks), and viceversa.

It's simple, it's not heavy on your cpu, and it verifies my hypothesis. And, most of all: I can't do any better. If it doesn't work, then I'll ditch it. I've been thinking about this for years, on and off... and didn't get it to work yet. What... I don't even remember in what bath tub session i resurrected this idea. Or if it was a shower I was taking... if I could quit my job and live by the sea, I could swim all the time and get so many more ideas. But I need someone on a kayak to follow me and take notes.

Then you go to the chart, like here:



And you check if say 12/15/2009 15:04:09 corresponds to a rise and if 12/15/2009 15:13:04 corresponds to a fall. Let's see... [...working... checking... thinking...] ... it does, but guess what: it's not what I want to know. I wanted to be warned before a rise and a fall.

So maybe futures work differently than their underlying securities. Or maybe I can figure it out and make it work. The fact is that right now, after my first try, record positive/negative differences (after one try that lasted 30 minutes) took place at the end of the risk/fall.

Need more work. I will come here as you go to "study hall", to think out loud, to work harder... working here makes me focus better, especially when I am lost.

--------------

Also refer to previous posts for other ideas relating to this. After all, I am not writing a book or a manual.


--------------

Anyway... I was checking on the market depth concept and how it resurfaced in my mind, and it didn't happen during a bath tub session, but during sleeping. One day, between saturday night and sunday morning, while sleeping I thought about it, and then I woke up and the idea was all there: I had to make sure that market depth didn't work, for the 100th time in almost 5 years:

http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/72598-my-journal-149.html#post1004778

 

[Yamato]

I was wondering just now how I can write such clear and logical posts. The ingredients are essentially two: i type fast so I can keep up with my thoughts, and I think slow so I can keep up with my typing. I either type slow or I am good at slowing down my thinking. Maybe some more ingredients that I am missing.

Sometimes I am about to think about something and I say to myself: let's postpone this thinking until I start typing my post. Actually that's what I always do when I type a post in here. I can't do the thinking first, because the thinking has to be thought for the first time in order for it to be logical. Otherwise I will just list the conclusions that I reached on my own, skipping the train of thought that I followed to reach them.

So: I postpone my thinking until I start typing, I slow it down as much as necessary as I type, and at the same time I type fast, without looking at the keyboard.

What does interfere quite a bit with my speed and therefore with my clarity and spontaneity is my constant looking up words and verbs on the dictionary. But the fact that English is a foreign language also keeps my language uniformly simple, because I know I can't afford to use complicated terms or it would be uneven, because I'd miss the refined terms everywhere else in my writing. So I simplify everything and keep it simple even when I could know one or two words to sound more cultured.

I rarely go back and edit. Sometimes I edit 100 times my posts, but that's usually when I am replying to someone and I don't want to be too aggressive. The first post is usual "you sonofabitch" and the last version is more like "thanks for your feedback".

 

[Yamato]

more money management thinking

So, just like above, I am going to think about this thing for the first time, in order to write logically. And I postponed this thinking until I could write it down here. But I guess everyone else, too, thinks as they write. Every once in a while I'll post the writing, so I don't lose everything I've written, just in case of accidents with the browser.

By the way, it's pretty funny that a few people here came and complained that I was talking about everything except my trading, so maybe somehow this made talk about my trading a lot in the past month, and thanks to them, I went into this good direction of reporting on my trading live on the journal, somehow to make them shut up (and because partly I agreed that they were right: somehow to earn the right to keep on writing here, about my father and the bath tub). But now that I've solved my problems, this journal will be even less about trading than before. So on the one hand I am happy that it's still liked. On the other hand I am expecting some censorship about this, from one of these new forum guides who keep on busting my balls wherever they meet me elsewhere on the forum. Anyway, I am safe since they supposedly don't read my posts. If they do, it means they secretly like it.

So I was postponing the thinking on money management.

This idea arose in my mind as I was replying to Dommo, who didn't read half of my 1000+ posts, and so his objections were kind of upsetting me, but my replies were useful to myself. Yeah, because it's like with my girlfriends. They may have been bitches, but my love for them was beautiful. It was a beautiful thing. So, congratulations to Dommo for my replies to his objections.

What I replied, if I remember correctly, is that my systems perform poorly with little money and something more regarding the fact that...

that...

it was in another place that maybe I came up with the concept that...

... that you can go from 5k to 10k with a quality money management and you can do the same with a ****ty money management. So let's continue from there.

I remember when I was at 5k...

 

[Prawnsandwich]

Re: more money management thinking

So, just like above, I am going to think about this thing for the first time, in order to write logically. And I postponed this thinking until I could write it down here. But I guess everyone else, too, thinks as they write. Every once in a while I'll post the writing, so I don't lose everything I've written, just in case of accidents with the browser.

By the way, it's pretty funny that a few people here came and complained that I was talking about everything except my trading, so maybe somehow this made talk about my trading a lot in the past month, and thanks to them, I went into this good direction of reporting on my trading live on the journal, somehow to make them shut up (and because partly I agreed that they were right: somehow to earn the right to keep on writing here, about my father and the bath tub). But now that I've solved my problems, this journal will be even less about trading than before. So on the one hand I am happy that it's still liked. On the other hand I am expecting some censorship about this, from one of these new forum guides who keep on busting my balls wherever they meet me elsewhere on the forum.

This does actually sond like a Travis Bickle monologue ..or maybe thats the point !

 

[Yamato]

Eh eh, thanks. My favorite diary (he kept a diary while making the movie taxi driver: you can see travis writing it during the filming). I am glad you're reading. It's almost like a chat where no one interrupts me.

 

[Yamato]

...so when I was at 5k in the spring of 2008, I went really fast to 25k (around) in a few months. But that was poor money management.

It's simple: I didn't realize it back then, but I had a chance of maybe 66% (all rough estimates) of going back to zero.

So about 3 times I actually invested with starting capital of about 5k and brought all the way to over 20k in a few months, and each time I was using a reckless money management, because, had it not worked, I would have gone to zero each time in just two weeks.

But it worked and I felt like a genius and now I miss those days, when I could bring my 5k to 25k in 3 months or maybe 4.

So I was trying to make sense out of what's happening to me now that I know more and I have better and more systems and I have been stuck between 5k and 13k for already 6 months.

The reason is that back then I was lucky and went up for months, maybe because the markets were rising and my systems are more long than short. Had I been unlucky I would have lost everything in two weeks in all 3 instances. Nonetheless I was lucky, and wasted all this luck because I gambled the money away and wasted it in other ways.

Now I am incurring some bad periods and yet I am not losing money, and this is because my money management is so much better than before. But also, during the good periods I am not making much because my money management is not as aggressive as before. It's using the best systems in terms of drawdown and Return On Account.

I don't understand fully what I am trying to explain and to understand as I explain it, but a rough estimate would be that right now I only have a 10% or less risk of running my account to zero, whereas before it was more like a 33% risk of that happening.

Tell you what: this is so unscientific that please forget all the percentages that I was shooting earlier. Let's just say that I was much more likely to go bankrupt in the early automated days than now. But my rise is also slower now: yet the rise hasn't slowed down as much as the fall, which has become almost impossible. Yes, believe it or not, with the systems I am using, I can't go back to zero right now, but only rise. By the way, today the ZN automated system more than recovered from yesterday's losses.

So I was thinking today: now that I am at over 6k of capital, why don't i start some reckless money management so to get back to 20k in just a month? But then I thought: no way. This 1k that I made back, whether with automated or even with discretionary is worth much more than 1k I was making two years ago, because it has implied fewer risks.

My trading used to be this:
reckless money management on my automated systems + reckless gambling

The first one was really lucky, and the second one just lost and lost.

As time went by the reckless money management on automated systems got better and better because the formulas got better, the forward testing meant everything... excel was learning like a sponge everything I fed him. And excel retained everything I fed him.

On the other hand my reckless gambling didn't lead to anything. I wan't a sponge at all. I kept repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and losing in the same ways for 12 years.

 

[Yamato]

And now instead, why am I saying that the 1k I make nowadays is worth so much more than yesterday's 1k?

Because it was a 1k that was built with 250 dollars bricks, in one direction and in the other. If I went wrong, both with automated and discretionary, I'd lose 250 dollars and that was it.

After going from 4800 to 6300, after tiringly putting together this wall with all these 250 dollars bricks, do I want to start building a wall the way I used to, a wall that could suddenly not lose 1 brick but crumble to the ground? No.

I mean, let's look at how I went down from 10k to 5k in about 1 week in November. And how I went from 20k to 10k in another week in July. Back then, up to very recently, I didn't know the value of money. My accounts went down like the Twin Towers.

I always felt that trading was like making money without working and I felt guilty because of that. But now I am starting to feel less guilty with this new trading of mine, that has reasonable money management, and I feel more like it's hard earned money. Yes, because I am gaining it 250 dollars at a time, whether on my automated systems or on my discretionary systems (which are more like manually executed automated systems almost).

 

[Yamato]

So if were to make one of my syntheses of the whole deal, after having reasoned about it out loud, how could I put it? I want to make a nice summary, but simple and that does not use terms that I don't completely control, like risk, reward and more bull****. One sentence summing up the whole reasoning.

Back in 2008 I was making 100% a month, but I could have also blown out my account in 2 weeks, and that was not a remote possibility because I know that is a possibility even now (but remote).

Now I am making 50% a month, but the possibility of blowing out my account is almost none.

It's definitely better now.

Summary:
What matters is not what your return is... but...

...but this is not right. There's something missing.

If I had had a 33% monthly probability of losing everything back in 2008, within the 12 months I traded since then... I had 3 lucky runs of 4 straight months where probably the markets went up and my systems made money.

You see what I am getting at: I didn't have a 33% monthly probability of losing everything, beacause otherwise I would have indeed lost everything during those 3 lucky periods, but I didn't. I gambled it away, but the systems didn't lose it.

And I didn't lose it because markets went my way.

So my money management was such that if I run into a drawdown (which I cannot identify, but there could be over a year where it doesn't happen), I'd lose everything in two weeks, and if I didn't I'd almost double every month. Simply because my systems were investing with all margin available on all systems available. It was crazy. On a couple of days I came home and had made 33% in one day.

Anyway, I am not smart enough to figure this out. I can't put it all together.

 

[Prawnsandwich]

And now instead, why am I saying that the 1k I make nowadays is worth so much more than yesterday's 1k?

Because it was a 1k that was built with 250 dollars bricks, in one direction and in the other. If I went wrong, both with automated and discretionary, I'd lose 250 dollars and that was it.

After going from 4800 to 6300, after tiringly putting together this wall with all these 250 dollars bricks, do I want to start building a wall the way I used to, a wall that could suddenly not lose 1 brick but crumble to the ground? No.

I mean, let's look at how I went down from 10k to 5k in about 1 week in November. And how I went from 20k to 10k in another week in July. Back then, up to very recently, I didn't know the value of money. My accounts went down like the Twin Towers.

I always felt that trading was like making money without working and I felt guilty because of that. But now I am starting to feel less guilty with this new trading of mine, that has reasonable money management, and I feel more like it's hard earned money. Yes, because I am gaining it 250 dollars at a time, whether on my automated systems or on my discretionary systems (which are more like manually executed automated systems almost).

Without having much knowldge of your trading methodology, it would appear that while you are not losing much money exercising money managemnet neither are you gaining much, which would appear to indicate that your risk reward is not so good ie your winners are not big enough or you do not have enough winners.....meaning your system needs to be revaluated....

 

[Yamato]

Well, you're right that there's a problem. I am not good at money management and even the term "risk/reward" kind of upsets me just to hear it mentioned. But I can tell you that somehow I figured out good enough homemade formulas so that as soon as I reach 20k, I will fly up to 40k in a bit over a month. I am pretty confident about that, and without a bumpy ride.

But yes, now, my system doesn't get anywhere. It's trading a few so so systems that have little drawdown but that are not the best performing ones. The best ones are the ones on the CL, but those guys lose 1000 a day if something goes wrong, and that's what I meant by crumbling to the ground like the Twin Towers. I can't allow those systems to trade. But even at 20k I won't allow them to trade. I don't want to risk losing 1000 or 2000 in one day because the system had a bad day.

I can't put it all together with words or concepts. I know there's a problem but these money management formulas drive me mad.

Plus there's much more than that at work here.

What I do know is that I'll only trade the systems that make money, and I won't trade any system that loses more than 5% of the account in its worst trade. So if there's a CL system that in its worst trade loses less than 1k, then I'll trade it. Otherwise I won't. If I take these things one at a time, I can use safe money management formulas. If you ask me to put it all together and explain it in one sentence, I can't.

It's not...
It's not how much you can make... I got it maybe.

You don't only have to know how much you can make and how much you can lose each month, but also what the probability of each thing happening is.

Then you can decide to go for it or not.

For example, previous scenario:
66% chance of doubling each month
33% of losing everything

Do I want that? Not. I don't want to have such a high risk of losing everything.

Present scenario:
90% chance of making 50% each month
10% chance of not making any money

I want this. Yes. I do.

And these are proper estimates, realistic ones.

According to kelly's criterion, both would be convenient. But to me only the second one is convenient.

To some people the lottery could be a good investment. If you need a lot of money immediately and you have no way to get it, you could rob a bank, play the lottery and such things.

In my case, I am doing what's convenient to me.

I told you: 90% of making 50% return, and 10% of not making anything. Even if it was 50% for each, I'd be ok with it at this point. It was expecting more of myself that made me get to zero each time.

You must know what's your chance of making and losing what percentage of your capital and see if you are ok with it.

That was it. That was my sentence.

And money management is this: 1) knowing the probability and entity of gains and losses for each type of investment available, and 2) choosing the investment that suits you best.

And this "that suits you best" is important because if you need a million in one week and only have 2 dollars to invest, what suits you best is playing the lottery. Even if kelly's criterion would say it has to be avoided. So there isn't one best money management. It all depends on how fast you want to get rich and on how much you care about losing everything.

 

[Prawnsandwich]

Well, you're right that there's a problem. I am not good at money management and even the term "risk/reward" kind of upsets me just to hear it mentioned. But I can tell you that somehow I figured out good enough homemade formulas so that as soon as I reach 20k, I will fly up to 40k in a bit over a month. I am pretty confident about that, and without a bumpy ride.

But yes, now, my system doesn't get anywhere. It's trading a few so so systems that have little drawdown but that are not the best performing ones. The best ones are the ones on the CL, but those guys lose 1000 a day if something goes wrong, and that's what I meant by crumbling to the ground like the Twin Towers. I can't allow those systems to trade. But even at 20k I won't allow them to trade. I don't want to risk losing 1000 or 2000 in one day because the system had a bad day.

I can't put it all together with words or concepts. I know there's a problem but these money management formulas drive me mad.

Plus there's much more than that at work here.

What I do know is that I'll only trade the systems that make money, and I won't trade any system that loses more than 5% of the account in its worst trade. So if there's a CL system that in its worst trade loses less than 1k, then I'll trade it. Otherwise I won't. If I take these things one at a time, I can use safe money management formulas. If you ask me to put it all together and explain it in one sentence, I can't.

It's not...
It's not how much you can make... I got it maybe.

You don't only have to know how much you can make and how much you can lose each month, but also what the probability of each thing happening is.

Then you can decide to go for it or not.

For example, previous scenario:
66% chance of doubling each month
33% of losing everything

Do I want that? Not. I don't want to have such a high risk of losing everything.

Present scenario:
90% chance of making 50% each month
10% chance of not making any money

I want this. Yes. I do.

And these are proper estimates, realistic ones.

OK you might be able to fly from 20K to 40 K in a month, but the important thing is to be able to do it over an extended timeframe ie consistent profits every month for at least 3 months and up....

If you're not doing this, and losing money, you should stop what you doing and reevaluate. Now, maybe the problem is that you are not sticking to the rules of your method, or maybe the problem is your method.

Also, the problem could be that the method is overly complicated and has too many grey areas where it becomes inevitable that you will stray from your rules.....

AT the end of the day if you are consistnetly losing money or even if you are not making money over a few months, something is wrong, and you need to establish what this is.

 

[Yamato]

Hey, you haven't been reading the 1500 posts of the journal... Obviously what's wrong is, rather than something related to my money management, my compulsive gambling, that caused me losses of 2000 dollars or even more (10% of my capital or more) on a couple of days per month, in the past 6 months.

Now that it's history, you will see how my account will grow.

 

[Yamato]

Little break here at work, from registering all the suspicious transaction reports being sent to us.

Just to say this: one thing is to go up from 5k to 6k with gambling, whereby you could also go from 5k to 2k in no time. Another thing is to do it the way I did it, where in the worst-case scenario, I could have lost 500 dollars in a week, and it would have taken me two months of bad luck to get to 2k.

I am starting to grasp something more about money management. I finally realize why I felt like I was such a good trader and yet I never really took off, like a wright brothers airplane. In two years, I've never brought my capital beyond 30k because my trading was taking such bad risks that sooner or later the accident happened and made me go back to the capital I started with.

If you asked me back then (in 2008), "if things do not go well, how much would you lose and in how long?", I would have replied "don't bother me with such questions". I would have dodged your question. But the answer was: I could go back from 5k to 2k in less than a week if either the automated systems or my gambling doesn't go well. Basically I was lucky enough to get from 5k to 25k about three times in about three months, and then either gambling or the same risks I had been taking in order to achieve that (with money management and using systems with huge drawdowns) always brought me back to 5k. Usually it was due to my gambling, but even gambling is none other than bad money management.

With my trading now, I have realized that inevitably my account will not grow as fast, but that at least there's a much smaller probability of having bad surprises, and that by the time I reach 25k, I have run out of luck.

To put it all together, I could also say this: there will always be a chance that I will blow out my account again, no matter what. But one thing is to use a money management (both in discretionary and automated trading) that gives you an almost 100% chance of blowing out if you trade for 6 months (just like for profit, also for blowing out your account, there cannot be a 100% probability) as I did for years. Another thing is to implement a money management that makes that chance equal 10% if you trade the system for 10 straight years (but then you can even start playing it more safely as your money increases). I think I will not achieve making 100% a month, as I managed before. I mean: I had a month where I tripled my money, by adding my gambling to my automated systems. So... that will not happen. If they told me: you either triple your money this month or you die, then it would be reasonable to try that.

But since I want more money in the future months, and not just to break some world record this month and lose everything the next month (or even this month), then it makes sense to use rules that will allow me to only make 50% per month but to reduce my risk of losing everything by a lot more.

Ultimately I do realize and admit that it all comes down to the kelly criterion. But since I don't like formulas I found it preferable to write 25 pages of reasoning about it.

Instead, all these 25 pages could have been summed up by this formula:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

But thanks to those mother ****ers, my father and all the other teachers I came across in my lifetime, thanks to them... I have an allergy to formulas and to many other things I have seen when I was in school.

So, once again... **** gaspar gomez and **** the ****ing diaz brothers. **** them all. I bury those cockroaches. What did they ever do for us?

For anyone who's not familiar with my story, Gaspar Gomez was my math teacher in junior high, and the Diaz Brothers were two professors (physics and calculus) I had in highschool.

Hey, who put this thing together? Me, that's who. Who do I trust? Me.

 

[Yamato]

Coming up next: more work on market depth

Stay tuned because in a few minutes I will post my latest work on market depth.

[...]

So here I am, back from work, tired of being all day like with Gaspar and the Diaz brothers. They can get kind of annoying sometimes. When they start shooting especially.

Anyway.

Here's the work. New code for my market depth tests:

Private Sub worksheet_calculate()
On Error Resume Next

If Abs(Cells(26, 12)) > Cells(28, 12) Then
Cells(30, 12) = Cells(30, 12) + 1
Cells(Cells(30, 12), 23) = Now
Cells(Cells(30, 12), 24) = Cells(26, 12)
End If

End Sub

How do you like that? Quite simple, and yet it does everything. It writes down a list of bid-ask differences (see previous "market depth" posts for explanation of concept, because we're talking about the whole 10 levels here) exceeding whatever you set the threshold at, in my case 6000. Here's a picture of what it does:



HOW TO USE IT
So far I haven't seen it work yet. In the sense that it hasn't warned me of much. As if it were random. Yesterday though it did not seem random. We'll see.

My plan is this: if say a large positive difference signals an impending rise, as I hoped, then it will be a LONG signal. But if it signals the end of a rise, then it will be a SHORT signal.

It could be used together with a moving average, this way: if we're above it, then a positive difference can only be accepted as the end of a rise. If we're below it, then the positive the difference can be interpreted as the beginning of the rise. The steps between this stage and trading it with real money are very very few. I could do the whole thing in a few hours. But first I have to see if it works. And another thing: this system cannot be backtested, but only forward-tested. So it would be all alone, and not in the same group as all the other systems.

 

[Yamato]

In the meanwhile, I made my first disciplined pro-trend discretionary trade without a public: without telling you guys about it. I was disciplined and that was good and it happened thanks to this journal and to the readers. And yet, since I didn't report it here, this time I didn't have to go through all the trouble of taking pictures and posting live ongoing profit and so on. It was much less tiring and stressful. It's still open, losing about 100 dollars. If it turns out to be a loss, it's ok. I won't relapse into compulsive gambling, not today.

 

[Yamato]

Big failure on the first discretionary day by myself

Wow... it's happened. Holy cow... I suck. That trade turned out to be a loss indeed. Then, right before it turned out to be a loss, I opened another one in the same direction, WITH the system, but the system didn't have it that I could open two different trades at once. And that was the first problem.

Then, when the second trade turned out to be a loss, because the market kept on falling despite the averages were on my side... then I lost control.

I lost control and I went against the trend, long again, and this time totally against the trend, with 2 contracts, with this sentence echoing in my mind: "I want my money back".

Now those two LONG trades are open, because today was a range today, and basically you get screwed if you follow the moving averages because you go with a trend that doesn't exist, and so each time you lose. Had I followed the system 100% today, I would have lost on both trades.

Let me know if you have any idea on how to discern range from trend days (which is basically the secret to making money all the time), at least approximately.

One way I could think is range, in the sense of high minus low. If it's a high range, then it should be trend, and viceversa. But you only find out it was a high range once the trend has happened, at the end of the day. I don't know.

Anyway, today big disappointment from myself. I don't know if I'll come back and type about all my trades again or if I'll manage to be disciplined on my own. I was tired of having to write everything down and having to take pictures.

 

[Yamato]

If i do lose on those 2 extra trades I made, then I lost a total of 1000 dollars for the day. 250 I'd lose in a disciplined way. And the other 750 I'd lose merely out of "revenge" trading. Basically I got mad at the market because it wouldn't go my way.