This past week I ended up with 1R loss. That was not the best result, but at the same time I’m pleased that the loss was so low - it means that I’m becoming more disciplined with my trading, and that’s something to be proud of.

I can also take pride in trusting myself a little more now. When I started, I didn’t really believe in myself, and I used to get out of trades despite being right at the end because of a lack of faith. I learned how to trust myself with experience, but somewhere along the way, I lost it again as I started branching out and doing risky trades.

If I didn’t branch out and tried new strategies with actual size, I would have been ahead of where I am right now. But that’s the tricky thing: once you start trading well and feeling like you’ve figured it out, you start thinking that you can predict the market when in reality you just need to react to it. I took some big losses due to trading random setups with an entire account, and that’s a lesson learned.

When you work with full size, you can risk less at a time - a 10 cent risk will set you back a lot when you work with volume. However, if you only operate with 100 shares, you can afford the whole zone (ex. $2-$2.25 range) to be tested. If I take a small position, I can give it a bigger range to see how it does, feel the trade and learn from it. And when it comes to small trades like that, the goal is not to make money but to gain confidence.

I have a background in sales, and it also took time to learn how to control my emotions such as greed and impatience. The important difference between sales and day trading is that one mistake here will set you back all the way to the beginning, while a mistake in sales will only lose a single sale.