Coaching Call Week 12

Today's call was rescheduled from my usual Wednesday morning time-slot because I was feeling a bit too ill and unprepared for the regular Wednesday morning call. Life has become very interesting recently and sleep, Trading and Music pursuits have all sacrificed a little. Since we finished the formal calls today's was free-form where we looked through my current open positions.

I suppose now is a good time to interject a little background to help set the scene. This posting is coming out of order, I'm actually writing this on 9/26 but am back-dating the post to 9/15 to keep the coaching calls in the order they actually happened rather than the order in which I finally get around to writing up my experience -- please forgive this minor inconsistency but I didn't find time to write up blog posts while all this was happening. As I've mentioned in a couple other postings I met a very special lady and well... those first couple weeks I put nearly everything on hold... Can you blame me?

So, in a hurried, impatient manner, and ignoring my normal good practices in finding a stock with a nice 2:1 (or better) Reward:Risk ratio and basically ignoring all my trading rules, experience and knowledge I opened 3 long positions while the markets and the individual stocks still had much more pulling back to do before it was time. I didn't have any open positions for the previous ~7 days and didn't want to have a coaching call with no open positions to discuss with coach Rob.

As you can imagine, at first glance Rob was bewildered by why I'd do such a thing. I believe the question was: "So you just wanted to tie a noose around your neck and hang yourself, yes?" I fessed up that I will not defend my positions and that impatience and wanting to have some open trades led me to entering these positions. Fair enough right?

I've already covered all this in another posting entitled: Discipline, Patience & TIMING! which is my confessional about all the sins I committed with those trades. I don't feel the need to rehash here, that would be far too much self-abasement for my taste and would be about as useful as actually beating myself up. Hey, I made some mistakes, and have that experience to draw from to not make them again. The great thing about making these mistakes is that I've been able to learn some lessons at no cost to my trading account. These are not mistakes that I'll soon repeat.