I noticed a pattern in some losses recently after tweaking my trading patterns a bit. I’ve been playing more liquidity concepts and catching lots of awesome pivots with extreme precision. Those pieces of my practice are really nice to see. But I found a pattern in losses I’ve taken where I’m trading a breakout pattern with high risk before there is any signal of a direction.
I can see the reason that I’m doing it is because I know there is a trend and I have a bias on the trend – I’m reading the signals with confirmation bias of direction instead of letting the market tell me which direction we’re going. Breakout setups I have to address differently – there isn’t a direction before the break. You can trade into breakouts, but if new data comes in then you have to keep evaluating and realize that you DO NOT know what direction a breakout will go.
I have a bunch of examples where I’m trading a breakout without any signal that it’s going to go the direction.
This XAU trade went against me. And this XAU trade I entered in a really random area after a break fail.
Why? Because I was biased. I had an idea, I didn’t wait for a really strong signal, and I let my mind convince me there was signal that wasn’t there. Breakout patterns are a signal that there _will be_ a trade, they are not a trade. This is not a pattern in my playbook with defined rules, this is not something I should be trading. I had a bad trade on NVDA yesterday too and then markets all widely sold right on the hour candle really unusually hard. Because I was trying to trade into a breakout I got blasted out of my position around entry so the stops were fairly wide still, and the stops still slipped because of the liquidity in CFDs.
As long as you can pick out the patterns that are causing you issues and you can do reps on the patterns, you’ll be able to adapt. If you just keep making the same mistakes, that’s where there are issues.
k-xs 
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