Hey Guys,
The market took a big dive yesterday after starting strong. The S&P 500 is around 4,080 right now.
The timing of that dive was not in my favor since I had a bundle of options positions closing yesterday. I broke even on two and took losses on all the rest. That was hard to see after being up strong to start the day. I also manually closed four stock positions this morning that reached their time limits, and only one locked in a profit.
The thing I remind myself is that we're still in lock step with the back-tested approach. What's amazing is that the back test includes all sorts of trade situations like what we just went through. We can look at the back test and see the black-and-white data that shows wins and losses, but until we live through the actual trades, it's hard to grasp the amount of emotion that can be involved on the way to each of those wins and losses.
Once you live through it, that's when you see that one of the biggest challenges of trading profitably is managing your emotions. There is real risk involved, and that tends to stir up emotions. That's why I try to detach from the emotional aspect, drop expectations, and focus more on sticking to the back-tested trading approach step by step.
Also, I was in this situation just a few weeks ago. I was on a strong run, and then took a string of losses in all my accounts. I stuck to my plan, and in the following weeks my accounts grew back up again. I'm not saying that will happen here since there's no way to predict the future. But I'm saying you never know what will happen next, and that's why I like having a strategy that lays out the instructions for me so that all I have to do is stick to the plan.
I loaded up on new positions today. In the main account, I bought W and TTD. In the options account, I took positions for SE and TTD. In the double down account, I bought stocks for VTR, EXPE and FRC, and I bought options for EXPE.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.