Hey fellow traders, I'm reaching out to find an accountability partner to navigate this journey together. I've been trading for several years, and while I've had my moments of success, I now realize my strategy was quite blind and ill-prepared. Currently, I have the luxury to focus full-time on trading, but it's a challenge to pace myself instead of diving in headfirst, which I know will lead to losses. I have enjoyed listening to Tyler's podcast while I am at the gym and admire the fact that he is able to practice without real money. However, that's not something I can consistently do. For about a month, I've been trading every morning but try to stop early to focus on studying and refining my approach. My goal is to develop a mixed strategy: starting with momentum day trading and, when the volume slows for the day, shifting to swing trading with a focus on options (which I am currently clueless about but see their potential). One of my biggest struggles is turning big green days into bigger red days due to carelessness. I've also fallen into the habit of averaging down when trades go against me, which adds stress even when it works out. For example, this week I had daily goals of $100, which going into today I achieved 3 out of 4 days. But on Wednesday, I lost $2,700 by being beyond reckless. That day I was up $600, thrilled, but took a quick loss that cut it in half. I chased it, ended up down $1,000, and chased a different stock until I was down $2,700 for the day. Going into today, I needed $1,942 to break even for the week—a huge longshot—but I found a situation I believed in, went all-in, and was up over $2k! I really should have stopped, but ended the day only up $402 due to a series of poor decisions on a stock that resulted in a $1,871 loss. Now, I'm down $1,540 for the week, which is frustrating, but could be worse. Next week, my goal is $200/day from day trading, but I'm aware that my losses may overshadow my gains if I'm not much more careful. (Sorry for rant but wanted to decompress in hopes the shame will help me to learn from my clear mistakes.)

Hey guys, this is a *Black Friday promotional message* I wanted to share. Full disclosure: I personally use this trading journal. There are many options out there however this one gets great reviews and is very easy to use. I'm personally happy paying for a service like this to make tracking things much easier. I have the Pro Plan. You won't need this until you're paper trading regularly / trading with real money. Full transparency: Also, the links here are affiliate links. This means I will get a commission if you sign up for this service through these links at no extra cost to you. You do not need to use these links if you don't want to. You can go straight to the website and still get the deal. Remember they have a trial so you can always test out the service. Visit TraderSync here. Here are the Black Friday Sales: Elite: $27.98/mo (Save $623.61) – Use coupon ELITEFRIDAY Premium: $20.98/mo (Save $347.65) – Use coupon PREMIUMFRIDAY Pro: $14.98/mo (Save $179.70) – No coupon needed! Visit the official website here to get 65% off. Why I use this journal. Journaling your trades is something you will definitely want to do to track your performance. For me, I'm willing to spend money on a service that does this for me. You certainly don't need to, and can journal manually using a spreadsheet if you wish, however software like this does provide additional metrics. Bottom line, it's very convenient and helpful, and I'm willing to pay for that. That being said, there are other journaling services out there if you want to review / compare. This service does offer a free trial. When you use this journal, your brokerage will autosync to the software, or you will have to upload a spreadsheet. Interactive Brokers autosyncs, and I tested it with Questrade where I simply downloaded a spreadsheet of trades for a given time period, and uploaded it to TraderSync. All the info was there so it worked well for me with 2 brokerages. So super easy to use. Again, consider the trial.

I have watched this video a couple of times now. Facinating set of interviews with large hedge fund managers talking about how they think about retail traders and using TA to determine trades. Some points from the video: 1. Always back test strategies to make sure they work in long term 2. Have a specific set of rules you always follow 3. Have an open mind when talking with other successful traders even if their method doesn’t match yours 4. Huge Institutions buy so large, they can’t just jump in the market. They need to create liquidity by making prices hit large areas of stop-losses and buying in at that point. a. Be aware - a couple of these interviews indicated that Stop Hunting is a thing: (Investopedia: Stop-hunting is a strategy to force others in the market out of their positions by triggering stop-loss orders. This is done by driving the price of a security up or down to where a significant number of traders are expected to have set their stop-loss orders. The triggering of so many stop losses at once typically creates a lot of volatility, presenting an opportunity for investors who want to trade in this environment. ) 5. The stop loss needs to be where it needs to be. Don’t artificially manufacture it to limit your risk. If you need to do that, then you were not entering at the right point. 6. Hedge funds use many factors on what to buy, and huge hedge funds do not use support and resistance for lack of liquidity. But smaller hedge funds will use it to make decisions on when to enter. 7. Only enter a trade If you are confident in it. There is no reason for a tight stop loss. This video and some of these points are clearly for mid to long term retail investors using a lot of Fundamental Analysis, and not all of them apply to day traders. https://youtu.be/f19bfHpCths?list=PLbQQDrS6E-GZcZG9qCERdKC7fE2xYU692

All, I learned a valuable lesson over the past week, and I wanted to share and get your thoughts. I was investigating the Postion trading/swing trading strategy. But because the markets were so crazy, it seemed like the support/resistance levels had jumped up. I ended up holding into a stock for too long and it took a dive. I realize is that goin into each trade, no matter what, I need an entry, a take profit and an EXIT point. I am still paper trading, Soni didn’t lose any real cash…but ouch! So my main lessons: 1) be careful studying charts with recent volatility 2) always set entry, and exit and take profit points. Did you notice this or have problems like these?

Hello fellow aspiring day traders, I'm on the hunt for a trade journal that works seamlessly on both PC and iPhone, ideally with a dedicated app. I’m currently using ThinkorSwim (Schwab), but its syncing capabilities have been underwhelming. As a workaround, I’ve been exporting my trades to CSV daily and then importing them into a journal. I’ve tried TradeVue and TradesViz, which look great on a PC, but their functionality on an iPhone via Safari is less than ideal. While there are some trade journal apps available, it seems they require import/export through the app itself, which doesn’t sound very convenient for saving files to my phone. I’m still exploring options, but I thought I’d reach out to see if anyone here has found a solution they’re satisfied with. Thanks, and I look forward to learning and sharing experiences with this group!