Trading Results for Thursday

Lost my discipline today....

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I lost 5 pts. today.

Today, I was doing fine in the morning, and stuck to my plan. I was up +4pts. in the morning. I didn't trade during the lunch hour, but I was watching the markets closely, probably too closely. In the afternoon, I got away from the plan, and started to chase the rally, and lost 9pts in the process.

Under normal market conditions, ES puts in 2, maybe 3 10pt swings in the whole session. But today was different, here is how swings of the day in ES went:

+11, -20, +15, -30, +30, -27, +40, ending up around +20 for the session.
It was a wild and crazy day, but that was not justification for the way I performed.

I started writing up the trading plan for each day in order to find out when, how and why I am not disciplined. I started becoming too emotional just from watching the market swing for 20pts at a time, so that by the time the afternoon rally appeared, I just started chasing.

There is no excuse for being up +4pts losing it all. It is not enough for me to say I will not trade during the lunch hour. From now on, if I am up at least +4pts before the lunch hour, I will have to force myself to actually shut the computer down and not even look at the markets for at least the whole lunch hour, so that I will be calm, cool and collected for the afternoon session.