Been trading news with a strong focus on monitoring my bias and trading the data instead of what I think. Been intentionally trying to trade news like the Powell Hearing at Capital Hill today, on the back of tariffs. I had a negative bias in the market, and pulled a green day with a long.
This feels _very_ good to really process my bias trading again, and I’ve made this mistake blowing accounts on multiple occasions now. Generally, my trading has gotten a lot cleaner without any big “woops” moments apart from one where I was stretched, had been over trading, and tried to short tariff news blindly thinking the market should go down. This is a terrible error – the market DOES NOT CARE what you think. “Respect the Market.” I STILL have issues with this in my behaviour, so I’m very deliberately focusing on ensuring that I grind this home.
The second piece, especially in news trading, is to be highly selective. I took some small shots today that wrecked my PnL on the good trade, I didn’t trade the A setup as hard as I traded the B setups because I had already kind of “spent” my attention and was feeling unsure. I knew it was the one, I said “okay this is it, last trade and I’ll let it run. I took profit right at the peak.
It was an awesome trade and the move reversed completely. You have to use your assessment of the market conditions only as a guide, price is all that matters.
So the next major target in trading is to not just scale down on B trades, but actually to skip them completely and be highly selective. I KNOW the trades that will work. The ones that I think might work are the ones to skip.
Also I built a product – a guide a deck of cards – that take all of the lessons and slogans that I’ve learned, and turn them into a product. I’m running out of capital and have to go back to work. My trading at this point is highly automatic and it’s very limited in the times that I’m willing to trade. I stop trading at 8:30am because I know statistically I will not win if I try to keep trading. Given the depth of discipline I’ve been accumulating in controlling my trading, apart from the periodic rampage sprint, I just stick to the rules basically, trade the first couple hours, and then switch gears to work on product development. Having a job would be an absolute boon – I miss working with a good team a lot and actually am considering relocation to get into the office with fellow engineers.
Almost there, year 4 in the trading journey and I’m really seeing it starting to click into place. It’s a very long slow process and it does require incredible dilligence to keep consistent. 33% strategy, 33% risk management, 33% psychology. If one of them falls apart, the rest does too. You can’t practice strong risk management if your psychology is busted – the second you get on tilt you’ll hold a trade thinking you know what the market should do. But if you have hammered into your head the discipline to know your weaknesses and always be aware of those blind spots and issues, you can hold that trinity together of strategy, risk, psychology.
k-xs 
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