Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Wednesday Notes - Five Stinkin' Minutes

4:00pm I'll be frank as always. I was as aggravated with my trading today as I've been with any day in the last several years, and for that reason am heading into the isolation tank this evening and have thus turned off the comments for today's post.

Suffice it to say that I lost a major chance at buying the hell out of the initial post-open retracement (my all-time favorite sequence), because I couldn't be at my trading station until 9:45am after ES had popped 8 points off the first pullback. Anything under 720 on the first TICK retracement was a high-probability GIFT ... no other way to say it, and the sequence was very, very similar to the $70K+ day I had in 2008 when I loaded up on the first bungee support.

I was ready for it, especially after watching the Globex trade since 5am, yet had a commitment I just didn't reschedule, thinking I could be back by 9:30am. And I should have. There are times in this business you have to cancel anything short of a wedding (your own) or funeral, and today's open was one of them.

It was frankly all I could do to reign in the emotions and try to make something out of far lower probability sequences after that "gimmie" played out. And it was a major struggle all day to scrape together the ridiculously teeny +$5K chip gain I ended with -- knowing I should have easily earned 1-2 week's pay today -- as my emotions kept returning to the morning opportunity loss. I was teetering on tilt big-time, and am still aggravated as I write this.

You plan, and then life happens. On top of that, I'm heading out of town Thurs PM and Friday and will need to rely heavily on my laptop ... assuming I haven't thrown it through the door by then.

Yes, I realize I've only had one net loss in the last 49 trading days. Yet this missed opportunity hurts ... bad.

Not a good way to start my 49th year.

P.S. Sorry if anyone found yesterday's initially posted blog photo to be offensive. I was unaware of the source and simply Google images that fit the day's blurb. It has since been replaced. And thanks for yesterday's well wishes.