A short dialogue from a YouTube video by Kardec Trader (Dec 31, 2023) in which two speakers describe personal bad trading habits—over-sizing trades (notably on Mondays), holding biases when the market contradicts them, and the corrective practice of tracking trades and journaling to reflect on thought processes and missed/opportunity trades.
Like, one pattern I recognized with myself early on is on Mondays I would go in with big size because over the weekend I would get this weird excitement of I.
Can'T wait to start the week. I can't wait to start Monday and make money.
I would take a trade, risking more than I should, and then the remaining four or five days I would spend trying to make that money back. Another mistake that I still make till this day is I get very biased on some days.
Oh, I think the market's going to go up because of X, Y and Z.
And if the market doesn't showcase me that I don't change my bias, I get stuck on my bias. And the way I learned that is by tracking my data, journaling my thought process, and just kind of looking into myself and how I think and how I operate. So I think people also have this bad notion of journaling.
It's like, oh, at the end of the day, I got to write in my journal.
No, it's actually, you know, reflecting on your thought process and the trades that you have taken and maybe the trades you've missed and why you missed them.
