Trading Journal – Bad Conditions to Good Conditions, Being ready to go big.

The principal knowledge in trading is not strategy, it’s self-knowledge. It takes what seems like endless effort to learn consistency without a mentor ahead of you who has seen it, and I’m not surprised by the SMB survey figures: 99% of retail traders never realize profitability. The oft cited figures are lower – 95% or 90% – but to me that seems high.

One of the hardest pieces of the psychology is realizing when market conditions change from viable to impossible and pivoting to better markets in those times, or just scaling back and waiting.

Today was one of the days that was the other way, from bad to good, and the hallmark of that transition for me is that the A++ setups I don’t push hard enough. I closed about 2x the daily range today – that’s stuff to make a trader-dad proud. ICT talks about how his kid will take the whole daily range, I took it twice today. But there was one trade that should have been a 25k trade that was only a $250 trade, and it was this one:

Yeah, those trades are all real, it was a crazy day, everything made sense. But the circled short had a confluence of about 5 or 6 short signals on it, and I didn’t realize until after the move all of the angles.

To trade means to be ready, to be ready with weight. And that’s why cutting the over-trading matters. You have to see that confluence, it’s just the easiest trade, you have to be ready to be plopping your account on it 1, 10, 100 times. It’s so easy, you don’t even burp. I was barely focusing today, I just saw the moves and the breadth velocity, and everything it was so clear. All of those hours, it makes those setups just so crystal sharp that you don’t even bite a nail off on entering.

This was a day to celebrate on skill, winrate, and profit factor stats, but it is a day to be sad about because I didn’t capitalize on the position. It was weak, should have been pulling 10%, 20% on the account on this position, even though it was actually a very small move. The probability of this trade working out was nearing 100%, one of the best setups I’ve seen in weeks and weeks.

The kind of last “salt bae” seasoning of the trader-beef is to make sure you’re ready for that opportunity. That could be a year’s salary in under an hour, no reason it couldn’t or shouldn’t be.