I’m not a superstitious person, such beliefs are incompatible with profitable trading. That said, Friday 13th got me this time around, slapping me down and putting a big black mark in my trading log.
To be clear, the error was entirely my fault. I should never have entered the trade. The setup was okay; nothing special but nothing terrible. It was the momentum that stuffed me. Or rather the relative lack of it. I jumped into PGR when the conditions were suboptimal, and this was the result:
Sure, the trade made some profit, but that’s not the point. As traders we should always be measuring our performance and rating ourselves on our execution, never on profit. And my execution here was shoddy to say the least. The suboptimal entry was the start of it. Staying in the trade longer than a few minutes just added to the poor showing. The signs were all there that this wasn’t great, and I should have got out earlier. Indeed had I done so, I would have bagged a bigger profit — poor though the trade was, there were another couple of hundred dollars on the table had I jumped ship earlier. As it was, I got out on the next bar not long after I saw it open and the price heading north.
Of course I’m not blaming my derisory trading on a date linked to the last supper or the arresting of the Knights Templar, that would be ridiculous. It’s more the fact it was Friday and I’m lazy and wanted a quick trade so I could be done for the week. Really I should have just taken the day off.
Things went better with core stock ROKU, which I don’t think I’ve posted for a while.
The setup was a little messy, crossing the MA and the previous day’s low, but the price pattern itself was a good one, and this time there was some decent momentum to jump on with. The trade was one of those ten-minute wonders, and the exit came when the momentum disappeared and the move faltered. Better execution meant making double the profit of that poor excuse of a trade on PGR.
Not a bad week overall, but my poor performance on that PGR trade is a big black mark in my log, and something I shall beat myself up over for some time to come. That’s no bad thing; it’s good to remind ourselves of our weaknesses, it forces us to work to improve.