There's a Lesson to be Learned

On Friday, rather than start off well and only later pull the plug out, I thought I'd get the big loser out of the way nice and early. I ended up trading Desperate Dan in the 16:10 at Wolverhampton (remember 4:10pm UK time is only 11:10am for me) and after opening with a successful 1 tick winning trade I quickly followed up with a 4 tick loser and then the daily monster... a 7 tick loser. Damn! My final trade scraped 1 tick back, but I had started the day with a $7.61 loss. I only managed to trade another 7 races resulting in 6 winners and 1 loser to end the day in profit (just!).

Yesterday (Saturday) was a disaster. Before Saturday my trading volume was just over $39k for a loss of $12.02 or just 0.03%. Saturday's figures were $5403 trading volume for a loss of $24.39 or 0.45%!! It seemed that no matter what I did the market quickly went against me. My confidence was dented and I should have stopped as soon as I began feeling that way, but I kept on going, ultimately losing in 7 of the 19 races I traded! Keeping with the silly multi-tick losers I have allowed to happen lately, 90.4% of Saturday's losses can be attributed to just 2 of the 19 races. Almost 79% of the losses came from just 2 trades!

My test bank has taken a bashing, but this is exactly why I am trading a test bank (possibly multiple test banks). If I'm going to lose money for any period of time, losing when playing to small stakes is the time to be doing it. And of course if I can't win using small stakes, increasing the stakes will only mean greater losses.

It means nothing coming from someone with almost zero experience, but the markets felt slightly different yesterday. Maybe I was the one who was different, or maybe the Saturday markets are indeed a little different from the remainder of the week.

Another day, another lesson learned. I'm not actually sure what the lesson is at this stage, but the greatest lessons tend to come from the worst experiences. It's at moments like this I wish I was capturing all of my trading sessions for later review. I am sure the benefits would be immense.