Trading Journal: Day 17 – Validation of Learnings – The Trend Day

I mentioned that Nov and Dec 2023 were a couple of my worst months of last year. Maybe more subjectively – my net pull trading was about +15% which is still not exceptional alpha, but it shows excellent progress. But those two months were full of trend days and I see so many traders get absolutely demolished on them.

But how can a day that draws a straight line be hard? Surely if you look like a diagram like this, your mom and dad and grandma and girlfriend/boyfriend/whateverfriend (2024 PC) say “that looks easy!”

These are the kinds of days I watch all kinds of people take huge losses on, myself included. I’ve watched so many traders eat huge losses on their portfolios on days like today. Today I celebrate catching most of the daily range.

This is the kind of day I would blow an account on historically, yet here I am fully green. The last few months I studied and processed the experiences that days like this taught me. It may sound weird but the most gratifying part is observing everyone shorting it while I ride it.

There is probably a gap in the middle of experience, where more experienced traders want to fade such strong moves. The beginners might ride it, and those that have felt pain know better than to short it, but there is a massive breadth of intraday logic that gets caught and it makes both sides of that experience gap a lot of cash.

Welcome to the trend day. About 1 in 10 fit categorically into this. These historically were my worst days. Today I stand with gains and a lot of the market movement captured. It took work to get here, and I hope to see less of you so severely damaged on the next one of these that we see. This should be the easiest day to trade, but you need to tease it out. A lot of my content lately has focused on identifying the qualities of the market early in the day. If you blew a huge hunk of your account today, know we’ve all done it, but it’s time to learn how to quantify these days. I’ll never take a huge hit again, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve been stuck in a position in a big loss. Process it – it can take months but persist! There is hope. Next time you’ll get it.

I still missed a bunch of this, but I caught still 60% or so of the move today. Given I could blow a prop account historically on these days, I’m extremely happy to see my progress.