Speculate to Accumulate

I’ve been thinking about the single race I did yesterday. I placed 9 trades, or 18 positions (entry & exit) in the space of a few minutes, not by throwing “caution to the wind” but with some essence of logic. Having analysed each entry and exit position I found that 5 of the trades were either scratch or 1 tick losses but of the 4 winning trades, 2 were 1 tick gains and 2 were 2 tick gains. The overall net result was a 3 tick gain on the race (losses -3 and gains +6).

This is not how I normally trade and I’ve said before that I am an extremely cautious trader. However, very often I find myself not opening a trade because of a number of things, confidence, fear of losing, whatever it is and because of this I miss many opportunities.

I feel that I now have no issues with my discipline and I am comfortable that when I actually open a position I will exit according to the situation, whether at a profit, scratch or loss.

I think that now I have to concentrate on my mental attitude to trading and I would suspect this is going to be the more difficult of my issues to overcome. A couple of readers have recommended books to read and if you have any recommendations then please do not hesitate to leave them as a comment, I’m sure they will be useful to others.

Anyway, on to today. I still didn’t get much done today. I had hoped that when I sat down at about 15:30 that I would get a good 2- 2½ hours of trading in but my new job has now issued me with a mobile phone. Guess what?, yep that’s right, I got the first call at 15:35, just a short one. The next came at 16:07 and lasted nearly 55 minutes. Ah well I managed to get 4 races in, all with profits for a change, and ended the day a whole £1.10 up which I’m happy with I guess.

The mental thing I’ll have to pursue but I have to get over this confidence, fear or whatever is holding me back. The saying is “Speculate to Accumulate” and if I’m not speculating I’m going nowhere.

Cheers