Campaign #1 Ends

The siege of Chang An has been lifted. In a most unfavourable manner.

My 36k positions got stopped out 2 nights ago whilst I was sleeping (and snoring really loudly, as Mrs RetailTrader claims). I woke up at 6am in the morning, checked my phone for the market movements first thing, and heaved a sigh of relief because while the market had gone down, it rebounded later in the trading session, and my stop loss did not appear to have been hit.

But it did... Because of enlarged spreads. Lesson learnt - when setting stop losses, if you have brokers who somehow very mysteriously like to widen spreads to hit your stop losses, please account for larger spreads. Thought of disputing this with my broker actually, but don't think I will get anything out of them except for some stock response that spreads can widen like Madonna the virgin in times of volatility yada yada scooby dooby..

So my positions which I have pyramided over some time are lost. But fault is mine alone, because my stop loss levels were also set based on Elliot wave levels that had, at least one day before my positions got closed out, shifted to a lower level. If I am trading rightly in a disciplined way, what I should have done was to shift my stop loss lower in accordance with the new levels, and close out the required number of positions in order to maintain the same amount of risk capital I want to take on for this trade, which was 8k.

So I'm left with 8k realised losses, and lost unrealised gains on these positions of over 20k. Ouch. That's what you get for bad trading. Less than disciplined risk management. Don't blame the broker! Don't hate the markets!

But last night I have opened 5k+ new long positions with another 8k of capital at risk, so here we go again.

Bullish till the 2467 low on SPX is broken.

Northern Campaigns #1 - The Siege of Chang An

Those walls, they will not fall..

The siege of Chang An continues. Unrealised profits are up to 10k, with drawdowns from peak profits for these positions in FAZ about 11k. Am I a fool not to have protected profits? But setting a tight stop loss and pulling out would mean that I will not be able to open the same number of positions again without busting my maximum allocated risk capital amount. The 36k positions in FAZ has taken time to accumulated with the shifting of my stop losses on the way so as to never bust the maximum allocated risk capital. It is akin to slowly training up your troops, and moving your troops and supplies from the capital (Cheng Du) to the border city (Han Zhong) over time to embark on the northern campaigns to take Chang An. Will I be forced to pull back the troops or will I manage to make ground and perhaps take some of the battlefields around Chang An, and even manage to seize the city? The campaign continues.

Hello

Yes it's been a long time. No shit. I could say there has been no time to blog but that's bullshit - it's just a matter of priorities cos everyone has only 24 hours a day.

I just watched some YouTube videos by GaryVee whose message is: if you want to get into content creation, focus more on the execution than the what ifs, than the perfection of this and that. Just get the content out first. Which is what I am doing on my mobile phone using the Blogger app I've just downloaded. With minimal edits save to put up some linkz. Is this a moment of impulse sort of post? Very possibly, if you don't hear from me again for some time after this then you'd know.

So what's up in the almost 3 years? I'm still trading but had to put down the bear suit after it cost me a bit of money. I've now assembled an "army" of short positions in FAZ and prepared to reap in money if the markets turn up, with a max risk of 8k. Positions are up 6k as if now although I've seen a 10k+ drawdown from peak profits with these positions. I'm feeling like Zhuge Liang whose slowly built up his troops and waiting to take Chang An. Will I succeed? First, I'm not Zhuge Liang, and he failed to take Chang An after seven freaking attempts, so.. let's see. I wanna keep the posts short and sharp so will be updating separately. And will be talking about some other stuff every other retail trader will grapple with like sucky jobs, retirement, crypto, mindfulness, and stuff. I think.