What caused me to pull out…

It was a very difficult decision. I was down from two trades last night. One, where I lost only $17.00. I bought 1 lot of the EUR/USD and it reversed on me. I closed out the position and thought it was going to go past 1.5500. It never did. Then I reversed my position and when short the EUR/USD and at 1:00 a.m. in the morning, the bulls ran the market past 1.5600.  The trouble here is I can’t trade at night because I’m too tired and I can’t concentrate during the day because I’m working. When I woke up this morning ready to leave for work, I thought, “Do I cut my losses now, or do I gamble and risk being wiped out of my account again because I didn’t put a stop loss on this trade?”

I’ve been breaking my own rules, adjusting them as I go, and adding new ones. Well, I was going to leave out and risk the trade. But then I thought about what I read over the weekend in the book about trend trading. “Losers in the market hold on to their losing trades because they want to be right.” I thought very hard and long about that and I decided that I was wrong and my number showed it. I was down $68.00.  So I closed out the position.

What happens when I go to work. The EUR/USD drops like a “hot potato”. I sit here at work not able to work because I think of how much I really lost be not staying in my trade. But the greater lesson is yet to be learned.

Trying to create your own system rather than being enslaved to someone else (working for someone else) is very hard. It is not easy at all. Think about it. Your trading your time at 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with a 1 hour commute each way leaves you with about 3-4 hours to either work on your system or continue to be enslaved to someone else.