ag94whoop said:Despite years of experience in business and entrepreneurship, I am literally a newborn in trading.AgsnFly said:ag94whoop said:
Well today has been an absolute bloodbath for me. A week ago I was up 20% for the year. As of now I'm down 20% for the year I've lost 40% of my value in my trading account in in three days. Holy crap. Tough lesson to learn.
Not to lecture but trading is all about discipline. This should never happen to a trader - investors are different. Which are you? Disciplined traders take losses when markets say they are wrong. Use stops if you are trading and think of high water marks on your account.
First ever trade was Jan 14, 2021, literally 6 weeks experience.
No one has directly taught me anything and what I have learned I learned on youtube and on here from you gentlemen, although sometimes I feel like yall speak a completely different language...lol. I missed OAs previous course. I started by swing trading stuff I knew like SNAP, UPWK, HD, APPL, SDC, PINS, PENN etc and frankly did ok, but the market was always good so I guess in hindsight any dummy could have done as well. I then followed a few Texags buys like WWR, EBON, ONTX, XL etc and made even better money. SO I then dove hard into CLOV, WWR again at higher price, DPW, and a bunch of others and I now know I missed the buys on several and the market has tanked on them all.
I dont ever day trade, but what I was primarily doing was swing trading for income with 2 day to 2 week target flips. While I am slowly learning charting, and can see market swings to a degree, I am very raw and inexperienced and there is SO much I dont know. I fully admit I am poor at understanding options trading and since I dont understand it well I dont do it, which kills some of my ability to hedge. I know I need to learn this. I am signed up to take OA's class this Saturday, although I coach soccer and may not be able to watch live unless it rains.
In addition, I am using You Invest which I dont think is very user friendly and I am not sure how to set stop losses on it. I have been doing everything manually outside of limit buy and sells.
I realize I made several poor buy price decisions and several poor "non sale" decisions. Those are wrecking me big time. But I DO think they may be good long term, although the continuous daily sliding is concerning.
From Jan 14 to Feb 4 I traded for $32k in realized gain. Since then, that has completely eroded (mostly in the last few days) to a $8k loss. At this point, I honestly dont know how to proceed. My gut instinct is that my 4 biggest current losers (WWR, CLOV, DPW and TLRY) will rebound at some point and become profitable if I am willing to hold them for months. Not sure what to do with the rest. I know the first thing I need to do is learn how to trade options so I can attempt to hedge.
I dont have any problem humbly admitting that I dont know what I am doing and love to hear guidance from a bunch of good Ags. I know yall will help and eventually I will learn this stuff and begin to make some money at it.
I would only add that you always remember that a trader's success is reliant on the cardinal rules of trading. Of these rules, some of the most important are the need to be patient with the winners and impatient with the losers.
This thinking is contrary to human nature which generally results with traders wanting to take profits quickly and sit on losers until they are successful. Human nature demands success and wanting to be successful on a trade keeps us from being disciplined in taking a loss that salvages our trading account.
This mindset works best when trading a trend and is the best path to wealth accumulation. Trading markets where mean reversion is paramount is a bit different but the rules still apply. Best wishes