I Want Out

Nursing a scalp gone really bad. My focus now is on exit. Not planning anything else until I've closed my position. And I definitely will close it today. Even a gapped up star on daily chart will not make me hold the short position. We're no where near price top. An evening star only works there (price peaks). What I'm seeing on both daily and hourly charts are telling me a rather bullish story (now, that sounds really familiar....did I say that a couple of days back??? why the hell did I keep selling then???)

I've mismanaged my trade big time. And I've broken my number one rule about not keeping a trade overnight.

I can continue to hold the trade and HOPE for the best - and if the best happened, I would have learned nothing. Or I could bail now, take a USD1k loss, and resume practice on scalping the way I did before. It's been 6 months now, and I still can't repeat what I did in Sept/Oct last year. Back then, running was my forte. Probably has something to do with the fact that I was entering on 5 contracts (ER2) each trade. I remember saying back then that I had wanted to reduce to trading just 1 contract so I can learn to HOLD a position, but was wary of a very likely consequence ie. that I'll get sloppy and not run when I'm wrong. 6 monts later, I'm living that very nightmare. Self-fulfilling prophesy, maybe. But it's looking more like I actually DID know myself very well then.

Now, I'm simply baffled. I don't know for sure why I had to fix what isn't broken. Perhaps it was the profit amount that freaked me out. It's extremely unproductive to think that if you can earn that much, you can also lose that much, coz I hadn't gotten there by gambling. I acknowledge that the market needs to be willing to move in the first place, but the rest is really just pure money management and focus. I was so willing to scratch whenever price didn't move in my direction immediately, or when it went against me by ticks! I was also willing to take ticks for profits. On rare occasions, I got a few points in under a minute. I always depended on the market to give me whatever it wanted to give within that single 3 or 5 min candle, and I was out.

Maybe what I really need to do is to go back and take a look at how I traded then. My style was certainly a lot less complicated. I look at chart patterns and only trade 2 to 3 of them, and I kept my eyes on the key S & R levels. And with the ER2 (TF now), I would use fib to buy/sell on retracement on a trending day. That was all. Nothing else. I didn't care about pivot points. And I didn't care about previous days' highs and lows. As far as I was concerned, they would have been key S & R on the higher timeframe, which I would plot on my 3 or 5 minute chart. Entries were ususally based on 1 min. I was able to focus on the "NOW" - no prediction on whether support or resistance was going to hold coz price was at historical high/low and such, or that it had gone up/down for days so it ought to be retracing, etc, etc.

Seriously, are other human minds able to process that much in a matter of minutes or even seconds? Am I the only one that has a brain that can only focus on ONE thing at a time? In scalping, for me, it would be on what price is doing NOW (eg. price is at support, and has formed a hammer; the next candle opens below the open of the hammer and is moving down - so the only thing I'll be thinking is that price is behaving oddly, and that I should just wait to see what happens next).

I really want to get out of this confused state. I have a very short attention span (I can't even stay depressed for more than 24 hours for crying out loud), and I'm wondering why I haven't gotten sick of being confused yet!!