What a horrible day I had. I made one very bad oversight on my first trade this morning and then compounded it by accidentally doubling up on my position instead of exiting it. To make matters worse, I was in the restroom and didn’t notice the error until a little while later after price had moved another point away from where I should have been flat! Aye aye aye.

It is my own damned fault too. In trying to save a couple bucks I have been putting off the registration of NinjaTrader (which is the front-end order entry software I’ve been using successfully for the past couple months…I highly recommend their free version for use when paper-trading) and instead have been trying to use TradeStationss Matrix Window for order entry. Well boy have I paid the price over the past few days for a couple of reasons.

1st) Is that NinjaTrader has 1-touch order modification so that I can instantly adjust stop & price targets w/out having to track down my orders in the matrix, then drag & drop them to new levels

2nd) Subsequently, I have found myself over-relying on longer-term trend plays and completely ignoring good short-term scalping opportunities because I haven’t felt confident in my order entry/modification tools.

3rd) In not being as familiar with the layout, I make mistakes like I did today and accidentally double up on a losing position where i meant to have an open stop order to take me flat…I never make these kinds of mistakes anymore when I use NinjaTrader

So a few hundred dollars short and a day late, I finally registered my Sim-version so that I can trade with NT in live mode. And I gotta tell you that just seeing that familiar interface made me feel a lot more confident. I only wish I hadn’t hit my daily stop loss so early today so that I could have taken advantage of some of those beautiful setups that occurred this afternoon.

Oh well, tomorrow’s another day and now I’m once again equipped to take full advantage of my full trading arsenal.

Consecutive Days Hitting Net Daily Goal: 0
# Days Hitting Goal out of Last 20 (with goal of 16/20) : 2/4
Weekly PnL (Stop = -6.66) : -4.57
Total PnL this Reset (Stop = -10.00) : -2.80R-Units