I learned an important lesson today. A lesson about a color. A color that I will never wear ever again. I’m down $11,000 and well can really only blame one color. You know what the color is.

I gave red a chance. I tried to make it work. I gave it every chance in the world. Fool me once, shame on your. Fool me twice, shame no me. So today’s one of those days where I got a little aggressive and I paid the price for it. I felt early in the morning that I was starting to get frustrated because I tried to take three trades and all three of them for whatever reason I wasn’t getting filled. It was really weird I’ll have to see if it happens again. It was probably just the luck of the draw, but I was feeling frustrated because I missed three good opportunities.

So then the fourth trade comes up and I’m trying to compensate for missing the first three and I go in with bigger size. I get right in. I’m like I’m not missing this one. And then it drops right away and I lose $4000. I mean it was ugly. And then a minute later I see another stock at the scanner and I did what I always say I shouldn’t do which is I just I impulsively jumped in. I looked at it and I was like oh my god it’s up 80 cents. It looks like it’s about to get halted on a circuit breaker. I’m going to jump in. It’s probably going to get halted. It’s going to open higher and boom that’s going to get me out of the hole.

I was thinking get me out of the hole instead of is this a good trade. And that’s that thing we talked about. About needing that moment of pause. If I could set up this type of thing on my account where if I have a trade that I’m down more than $4000, I’m not allowed to take a new trade for 15 minutes. Just a pause. And if I try to it’s going to reject my order. “Hey, you’re in your 15 minutes pause.” That for me would be incredible because it would stop me from doing the snowball. Having one loss and then right away going in for a second, a third and a fourth.

So, I’m down 11,000 bucks today and even though I was up 14,000 on Wednesday and 4000 yesterday, today feels a lot worse than those days felt good. So those days are like yeah decent days and then down 11,000 bucks. Feels horrible. And going into the weekend I’m going to spend the whole weekend thinking about how I’m such an idiot for being so aggressive. But I’m going to try to cheer myself up, pat myself on the back and say hey, you’re still up $20,000 on the week. It’s still a great week. Yeah, you pushed it but you don’t know your limit until you push it and you don’t get to $583 to half a million dollars without pushing it sometimes. And when you’re on the edge of your comfort zone, sometimes you will. You will have losses. But you get back on the horse and that’s what I’m going to do on Monday morning.

So anyways, we’ll break down all of the trades today during today’s midday market recap.

All right everyone, so finishing the morning here. Important lessons were learned today and that’s what trading is all about. Learning from your mistakes. My biggest mistake was choosing to wear red today which is a color that I will never wear again as a trader. Finishing the morning down $11,000 which is obviously completely disappointing. And I had such a great week so be up 28,000 on the week and then have this loss is disappointing for sure. To have the loss right before the weekend, I’m going to be thinking about it all weekend long.

Yeah, I’m still up 20 grand on the week or whatever it is which is good. But it almost, it’s one of those feelings of you’re only as good as your last trade. So it just basically feels like that doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m just being honest about how it feels. I’m sure some of you guys are like, “Geez, I would kill for a $20,000 week even if it meant that I had to lose $11,000 on Friday. I’d still kill for it.”

But when you’re in the midst of it and you’re in the zone, you don’t feel like a hero for finishing the week up 20 grand when you … It’s like if you’re in a race and you have the best time but you crawled for the last quarter mile. It’s like all right. I don’t really feel like I finished with a lot of confidence or a lot of strength. Yeah, I finished. I guess I came in first or whatever it is. But it’s certainly not the strong finish that you were going for.

So that’s kind of how I feel right now. And again, I’m not trying to be ungrateful for making $20,000 in a week. I do feel really fortunate for that and those feelings of being fortunate will come a little bit later. But right now I still feel a little bit disappointed in my trading today.

Let’s break down the trades from this morning. It happened pretty quick. I stopped trading at 9:40. I was done in the first 15 minutes. So very first … Well here’s the thing. This is interesting. So, my first trade attempt was on MDGS and what was kind of weird was I tried to jump in at $2 for the opening range breakout, 10,000 shares. I punched it at $2 and I didn’t get filled. Bad luck. It is what it is. So I didn’t get filled at two bucks. It squeezes up to a high of 2.40 which would have been $4000 winner and I probably would have sold for like a $2,500 win. I probably would have gotten half of that. So that was a bummer that I missed that trade completely. I didn’t get anything on that. Nothing.

Then CALI comes up on the scanner and I tried to jump in CALI with 5000 shares at 2.27. It then squeezed up to … sorry, 5.27. Then it squeezed up to 5.84 and I missed it. So I missed two trades in a row and now I’m really getting frustrated. And I knew I was getting frustrated but I was just like take a breath. It’s okay. BGI was halted. It was up 100% and it resumes from the halt and I jumped in thinking it looked like it was going to squeeze higher and maybe go to $3. I got in at 2.57 and 2.59 and 2.69 here with like 6100 shares.

It then instantly drops to $2 and I was just like okay, that’s going to be a loss. It pops up to 2.50. I gave it a second and then it dropped all the way to $1.56. What a rejection. So this is really … you have a margin of error and for whatever reason on this one, it just didn’t hold up at all and so I took a $4000 loss on it. And here’s the problem. So that was at 9:38. And 90 seconds later, CDNA hits the scanners and without taking time to really show down and say look you’re down four grand on the day, why don’t you just maybe call it a day and be done. I see this spiking up and I’m like I’m going to jump in it. I’m going to jump in it at $8 because this thing looks like it’s going to get halted on a circuit breaker. I want to get in before the halt. It’ll probably halt and then I’ll try to see it up around nine bucks. That’s what I was thinking, right, so I was like I’m just going to jump in this.

And I jumped in aggressively. I was thinking it was about to get halted. I took 10,000 shares and then added another 2500 at literal high of day. Well, not literal. It was 8:30 and it hit a high of 35. And then it dropped. It came all the way back down to 6.98 three minutes later. It did not hit a circuit breaker halt. It did not continue higher and on that one I had to bail out. And I sold half at 58, a quarter at 48 and the rest at 40 for a $7000 loss. That’s how quickly the tide can change.

So, one of the things that I was mentioning in the little video that I made before this recap so those of you watching on YouTube will see it. Those of you on Facebook you haven’t seen it yet. I was talking about how you don’t know your limit until you push it. And you don’t know how long a hot streak will run until you take that loss. Because in the last few days stocks just like BGI have been getting halted three times. So buying after the first halt has been okay because they’ve been going into a second halt and several have gone into a third halt.

So this based on the setup we’ve been trading this week but this was a good entry. Now it didn’t work but it doesn’t mean that this wasn’t working all week. And that’s what gave me the 28,000 or whatever in profit that I got up until today. CALI, it was the same thing. I got in that at 5.25 as it was squeezing up and it squeezed up to $8. PRPO, I got in at $1.28 and it squeezed up to 2.50 or whatever it was. So this just didn’t work today and I should have been faster on CDNA.

I should have to thing. I should have said … I shouldn’t even taken the trade because I should have just said you’re down 4000 bucks. Be very, very careful about what you’re willing to trade. It’s better to wait on the pullback than just jump in and on this one I just jumped in. And that was a mistake. I should have waited on a pullback. Jumping in can work when you’re in a really strong market. But today already I was getting the early warning signs that the market was not strong. So that was a problem.

I wish that I had this kind of reset button my account where I go into my trade warnings here and I could create a warning. I have a warning at share size. I’m going to bring this down to 10,000 shares for Monday because I don’t want to take really big size on Monday. I want to just be green and get back on the horse and not have another big loss. But I wish I could have another one here where if you have a loss bigger than X amount and maybe I say $2000, warn me on taking a trade anytime for the next 15 minutes. So I would just sort of have that additional warning sign not to keep jumping impulsively into trades. Because it can be impulsive.

And that’s what I talk about with the emotional side of things that even though logically I’m saying, yeah I got to wait, I got to slow down. When you’re in the heat of the moment especially after having a really big win or a really big loss, it’s easy to get a little impulsive and to trade from an emotional standpoint. I’ve been doing this for seven years, six years and I’m saying even now these things still happen to me. You don’t become totally immune to it. You constantly have to re-enforce good trading behavior and making good decisions even when you are under pressure.

But we were looking at my trader view report yesterday and I’ll pull it back up today just to again put things in perspective a little bit. Not to discredit the fact that this is a red day, but this is my month so far. This’ll be my third red day of the month. I can look at … let’s see where is this. Win/loss days. I try to remember which one shows the big equity curve. New filter. I’ll filter this all the way through January of 2017. Win/loss expectation. I can never remember where it is.

There’s somewhere where you can see a chart of your equity curve. I think it might be under detail actually. Detailed … win/loss expectation. Here it is. So this is my equity curve. Starting $583 a year ago. And strong move up. Some sideways, sideways. Another big push up right here. This was a huge leg up. But I had some draw downs. I had drawdowns here and I had a little drawdown here in February before I started to open up. So this right here, this little blip, was $14,000 of profit. So just to put it in perspective. So losing $11,000 today, I’m going from here to like here. And I’ll recover. I’ll get back on the horse. It’ll be Monday morning and we’ll just keep grinding back up making my way up towards the million dollar line in the sand.

That’s the goal. To take $583 and turn it into a million bucks. And it’ll happen. And there will be other big days like this. This isn’t my biggest loss of the year and it probably won’t be the only time I have a five-figure loss in 2018. I’m sure I’ll have another one that catches me off guard. I’m in a really nice hot streak and then boom, I take a big loss and I get knocked down. That’s part of trading, getting knocked down. And that’s why a lot of people say this is such a hard job because you’ve got to be able to handle getting knocked down and it’s not fun. It’s not fun to take these big losses.

Actually this might be the biggest loss of the year. I don’t remember if I had a day in February that I lost this much. February was a worst month in terms of accuracy but let’s see. Yeah, I actually didn’t have a $10,000 … $7500 losing day. And then in January, January was pretty strong so yeah this is actually my worst day of the year here. That’ll be $11,000 … why do I not have a trade for the 13th? Don’t tell me I didn’t trade that day because I know that I did. Let’s see, the 13th. Yeah, all right. So I’ll have to add that in there.

But anyways, 14,000 green on Wednesday. 9000, 8900 on Monday and yeah 11,000 today. It’s disappointing. I guess it’s the worst day of the year but it’s probably not going to be the only day of 2018 that I’m down more than 10 grand. So, you guys will be able to watch over my shoulder through all the ups and all the downs. Midday recap every day as usual. This is really you being able to see what it’s like to be a trader. Yeah, we’re going to have awesome days. $30-40,000, $50,000 days. I’m hoping to have a day sometime this week where I make $100,00 in a single day.

But I will have days where I also take big losses. If you’re stepping up to the plate and going for big winner sometimes you’re going to miss and you’re going to strike out and that’s just part of the deal. So, yeah, Peter still finishing up probably 18 grand on the week right around there. So green is good and even though I had a little bit of a bump here at the end of the week and I learned a important lesson about wearing the color red, it’s not going to stop me from getting back on the horse on Monday morning.

All right, so I hope you guys have an awesome weekend and we’ll be back at it first thing on Monday. All right, I’ll see you guys then.

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