New Low

I traded the NQ futures this morning and lost more money. Again, going long when the model is short and the market already down a lot, hoping to catch a falling knife and then doubling up to two contracts from one when I was already down. All the mistakes I could make, I made. Now reached a new low in trading profit and loss for the last six months.

On the other hand, yesterday morning I made simulated trades in the Australian (SPI) and Nikkei futures. I made three SPI trades which were all winners for a total of an imaginary $A800 or so. In the Nikkei I made ¥5,500. That's more than I lost for real this morning. Why do I trade better with imaginary money than real money? It seems a lot of people have exactly this problem. I'm going to do more simulated trading later today. I think this is the best thing to do at the moment.

Yesterday lunchtime I met a guy who works with Snork Maiden. He does stuff with neural networks but hasn't applied it to time series. He is also interested in trading and has read quite a bit but hasn't actually even opened a brokerage account yet. I guess it was mostly me telling him how tough it is and what does or doesn't work. Later I met a PhD student at ANU who wanted to quiz me on one of my research areas and I also worked a bit on a paper I am revising with a former student in the US. More people here are finding out that I've returned to Canberra. I bumped into one guy who was riding his bike on campus. He used to work as a non-faculty staff member in my department. In the meantime he did a PhD and is now a lecturer (assistant professor) at ANU. We haven't met in five years but he recognized me stopped his bike and we had a chat. Another guy sent me some stuff about jobs here. I'm not willing to give up on the trading dream yet as I have barely gotten started on trying to trade Australian and Japanese markets during the day here. If that doesn't work for me either then maybe I'll have to admit defeat.

My emotions now are different than they were after other recent losses. Then typical I couldn't bear to trade for a while and felt very upset and despairing. Now I fee angry with myself and frustrated. It would have been good not to go right back in and trade today. I guess "revenge trading" is what screwed me up today.