Well, it happened. I wiped out my account today.

I had a bad feeling when I begun, but I decided to trade anyway. I begun a short position, but the market went against me. Instead of thinking rationaly (or carefuly) and backing out as soon as I can, I let the loss go far too much, so that my account got under the $1000 I need to have there in order to continue trading.

Then I just made more and more stupid moves, and just got things worse, till I went over my $700 loss permitted per day. So I have now about $600 in my account, which means I will not be able to trade in the near future, until I add some more to it.

I am not sure what I should be doing now.

I took a long weekend off, and I must tell you – that was so refreshing! I must do this more often.

My flight back was a night flight, so I spent this morning sleeping. When I finally decided to trade I didn’t have much time, so I decided to take the simulator.

The market looked as if it will go down, but then it went up again. Then it seemed it would soon get back down, so I entered one contract in a short position, and then another. Then it was time to get the kids.

I came back 20 minutes later to find myself out of both contracts with a profit of $75.
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As always, my impulsivity won: I decided to try again on live trade, trying to catch the last ticks of the downward movement. I switched to live mode (Transact programmers: why does this have to include exiting the program, including the charts, and re-entering again? You should have designed some switch -which should include re-entering the password but not getting out of everything!), and tried again. As often happens to me, at this point the market went up again. I managed to quit with 0 profit, losing only the fee.

Then I tried again with a long position. This time went better: the market was going up. I quickly discovered that the brackets were not switched on, so I quickly quit with a profit of $50.

After trading yesterday I set my platform back to simulator mode, so I will not trade live accidently. Today I opened the platform on the simulator, but then decided the situation was sure enough for a small live profit.

I switched to live, entered a short position with one contract, and waited. During my wait I left the laptop for a few minutes, and when I came back I found I was already out with a profit of $37.5. Had I sat down near the pc I probably would have pulled my take-profit point one point lower, but anyway this was good enough for today.

I’m taking now a short vacation for this weekend, so will be back to trade sometime next week.

As you have probably realized, I have been taken some time off from trading. Today I had some free time on the afternoon, and decided to try.

I opened the platform on the simulator mode and realized the market was diving down. The charts were taking a long time to load so I decided to try a short position anyway. I tried, and it worked so I added one more contract, than another, and exited with a profit of $125 over 3 contracts.

At this point, as the market was still going down, I decided to move to live trade and try my luck again. I was lucky – I was able to make $50 with one contract.

At this point I realized how lucky I was: The market went down another point after I quit, and then went up. It went up till now 4 points (3 points over where I had left).

I opened the platform today and found the market had gone up today, but looked as if it would soon go down. It went already over the R1 line, which often means it would not be wise to try a short position, but I decided that I could risk a short short position.

I went in with one contract, and then when the market went up a little added one more contract. I was soon able to quit on the first contract. I didn’t want to quit too quickly on the second contract, but was also afraid to wait too long. I decided to solve this dilemma in the usual way: I added one more contract so that I will not have to wait too long for a bigger profit. Later I added one more contract, and was finally able to quit with a profit of $167.5 over 4 contracts.

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After this trade was finished, as the market seemed to still be going down, I decided to take a risk and do a live trade. I was very hesistant and scared, but I finally did it. I entered with one contrace, and then the market went up a bit. I added one more, and the market went up more. On the demo I would have added one more, but on live I was too afraid. I waited, and finally quit too early with a small profit of $50 over the 2 contracts.

After over a week in which I didn’t want to touch trading (and also not having time for it), I finally went back to the simulator today. I again entered a position quite impulsively, not waiting enough. But after adding 2 more contracts to the mix, I was able to exit with a profit of $150 over 4 contracts.

Why is it so easy to trade on the demo, while trading on real life is so difficult?