The Indisciplined Trader

[bottrade]

Been trading for quite sometime now, still struggling to become successful in trading. Manually backtested this trading strategy, looked fine but couldn't follow the plan, always end up going with impulse trades. I can keep booking profit for days until I am not. When it comes to loss, I don't book, keep averaging and holding and end up blowing the account in few trades/days. If the loss is not putting a big dent in my account, that's because of market's mercy not because I cut the loss small. Following a plan in live even with paper trading is hard. So the reason calling myself the indisciplined trader.

So here I am attempting to become disciplined with a hope of becoming successful in trading. Gonna post what I do, any help from experienced traders here in Traderji forum would be appreciated. Any guiding, correcting, suggesting would be fine.

For now the setup is pivot trading - linked above. Stop loss are based on pivot and candlesticks, not based on $ value. Entries only between 0930hrs - 1415hrs, no trades in the open / last hour and no overnight holding. Actually this setup doesn't need any indicators, but I am plotting few in the charts for now to see if they could be of any help in filtering or so. Naked long options, I understand the probabilty is low here but to trade futures I would need a much bigger capital. I don't think I can trade spreads now. Primary objective at this point is to be disciplined and follow a plan.

Here are the trades in last the two days. All trades are loss, it's super hard to follow when losing. In the back of the head, wanting to scalp.

Spoiler: 26 Mar

Spoiler: 27 Mar

Green - Long
Orange - Long Exit
Red - Short
Blue - Short Exit

 

[Anurag N]

Some steps that I can suggest -
a) Cut your position size- Right now I can see that the absolute loss amount does affect you and it takes over trading rationale. The size of your loss should only be as big as your risk appetite. Once you start not feeling bad about loosing X amount of rupees, you would give more importance to your plan. When you become comfortable with this size then slowly and gradually increase your risk appetite.

b) Trade on higher time frame- In case you don't have long experience in the market, I would suggest you to first trade on higher time frames. This will slow the process a little bit and give you time to make proper plans before the market begins. Intraday setups require really fast decision making. Once you get used to sticking to your plan on a day-to-day basis then you can try your hand in reducing timeframe.
Another benefit of higher timeframe is that your indicators will give better results. I can see that your plans are heavily dependent on indicators. On very short time frames they give out a lot of noise which will be avoided if you increase your time frame.

These are what I can think of on the basis of what you mentioned. Let me know if you need more clarity.

 

[bottrade]

Position size - I keep a capital to a point where I can only trade minimum quantity. I tend to look at the size as how much I could make, not how much I could lose. That's one problem.
Timeframe - I don't have the mental structure to hold positions overnight. I like to sleep at nights. Even though I look at 5min chart, I don't tend to hold long when I see profit. But when it comes to loss, I hold the position to come to profit even if it takes whole day. That's another problem.

 

[bottrade]

I need to have an entry rule when market moves in one direction right from the start. Like yesterday, I was just staring at the screen during the morning rally. 4 trades and all end up losing

Spoiler: 28 Mar

 

[Anurag N]

You need to have a proper thesis on your trades based on which you can make a profitable setup. To avoid staring at screen and indecision the best thing you can do is to have fixed entry, exit and stop numbers. You need to place these as soon as you start a trade.
Generally I don't like putting exit/stop loss orders on my trades, I just keep a mental note of it. But for beginners it is highly recommended to put the stop and exit orders as soon as you enter.

 

[bottrade]

I got it to the best of my ability, now the job is to follow it to the dot which is the hardest. Yeah, for beginners indisciplined/disobedient mental note of stop won't do.

 

[bottrade]

Deviated from the plan...

Spoiler: 1 Apr