Morning Traders,
At SG Futures, we spend time reviewing each other trades across the previous week so we can look into areas we can improve upon, as well as best practice sharing. Typically on a Monday morning, we’ll spend time reviewing the previous week, so today being Sunday, I’m going through my trades from last week so I can have commentary uploaded to the shared drive in time for tomorrow morning.
This week was mostly a good week for me, but I have to be honest, I really let myself down on Friday night coming up to the close by taking on trades I typically wouldn’t normally take on, and as a result, I handed back my whole day’s P&L. The ES was starting to gradually sell-off late in the day, and I ignored all of the market internals and sat their buying the market thinking it would go back up – it was purely emotional dip buying. Looking at this in the cold light of day, the internals supported short trades only at this time, and in the context of the week in general, we’d had significant moves up meaning other traders were likely to take profit meaning the market would come off a little. When you combine this with the pattern we’re seeing of short term traders not wanting to take home a position into the weekend due to Trump Tweets, it should have pointed towards sitting on my hands or finishing up early.
I’ve been trading so long, and the process I have in place is to stop me from doing things like what happened on Friday night, but sometimes we need a slap in the face like that to remind us that we’re human after all. I will carry this into next week & beyond, as I’ve had a good run over the summertime, but I got very relaxed with the weekend coming into view – I allowed my standards to drop, and a got bit over-confident. I will bottle it and move on, I won’t personalise it, but it’ll be in the back of my mind when looking at setups going forward.
So if you took some losers during the week, review what went wrong, try and understand what you’d do differently if you were in the same position again, but most importantly, bank it and move on. Taking losers is part of this job, most of them should be ‘good losers’ where you were just wrong, but it was a good setup and it didn’t cost you much. The ‘bad losers’ are the ones we should spend time focusing on, and more often than not, I’ve found that, it was my emotional decision making at the root of the issue.
We’ll be back again tomorrow with a full review of the overnight session in the run-up to the cash open in the ES. If you’re on a level 2 platform, today would be a great day to spend an hour or two rolling your chartbooks from September (U) to December (Z).
Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
