Diary of a stubborn trader: scalping EUR/USD without indicators

Eighth day: 6 operations, 5 winners, 1 loser. +3.6R. I only took tickets with clear structure, without forcing anything. I felt like a trader for the first time in a long time.

Someone reading this is going to think I'm bipolar, one day I look like a pro, the other a rookie, but this is trading, an emotional roller coaster with background graphics.

Ninth day: I didn’t operate for personal reasons. I was frustrated that I couldn’t stand in front of the screen, as if I missed something. Bad symptom, I think.

Tenth day: 4 trades, all losers. -3.2R. I completely skipped my rules. I am considering stopping a week. The diary does not lie: when I leave the discipline, the market charges me.

Reflection after ten days: the key is not to know more, but to do less. Less impulses, less operations, less noise. Just focus on price action and respect the system. This is teaching me more than any course.

One of the most common mistakes between the novice traders – and also many experienced – is to underestimate the impact of the emotional management during the operation. We can have a profitable strategy in the paper, impeccable backtesting and theory of surplus, but if we are not able to execute that strategy under pressure, in the real moment of the market, of little use all the above. The emotional factor is the great silent saboteur of the profitability. In my experience, the real change comes when you stop looking for the perfect operation and you start to observe yourself as part of the system. For example, if each time you lose two operations in a row you start to operate more aggressively or out of your plan, it is not the fault of the system. It is your emotional management that is unadjusted. Many fail not because their analysis is wrong, but because they react badly to the normal results of the trading, as a breakaway, one tool that has greatly helped me to carry out an emotional diary, not only of operations. I notice what I felt before, during and after every trade: fear, euphoria, frustration. So I have been able to identify mental patterns that I have repeated.

Thank you for sharing this very real reflection. I felt totally identified.

And what do you do when the journal shows you that you're just repeating the same mistakes over and over again?

Excellent contribution. It’s the best I’ve read in this forum lately.

Thank you very much, you just opened my eyes to my own post-trade behavior.