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Last week was a pretty challenging trading week for me. This was the first time I had experienced a holiday week since I started trading and the resulting low volume caught me off guard. I also made some execution errors on my trades which turned what could have been a profitable week into a winless week. Fortunately, I maintained good risk management so my losses were manageable.

My Trading Stats: 7/3/23 - 7/7/23

Total Trades: 4

Winning Trades: 0 

Losing Trades: 4

Win Rate: 0%

Weekly P&L: -$263.80

Weekly ROI: -5.28%

Beginning Balance: $5,000

Ending Balance: $4,736.20

My Trading Recap: 7/3/23 - 7/7/23

I came into the week feeling confident and eager to trade but I was completely thrown off by the holiday week. I knew the markets would be closed on Tuesday for the 4th of July but I didn't expect to see such low volume on Monday and Wednesday. The low volume resulted in very little price movement on $SPY so I struggled to find good trade setups.

My Best Trade: My trading mentor always tells me that I should focus less on my P&L and more on creating winning trading habits. So even though I had zero winning trades this week, I did have a big win in my development as a trader.

On Monday, I didn't see any great trade setups due to the low volume and price movement on $SPY. Even though I had a burning desire to trade, I was able to muster up the self-discipline to sit the day out. This might not sound like a big deal but mastering my emotions as a trader has been one of my biggest challenges so I feel great about following my trading rules and not forcing any trades.

My Worst Trade: On Friday, I netted a whopping $97.92 loss on a single trade. The problem with that is that my max risk per trade is supposed to be 1% of my trading account but $97.92 is a 2% loss. Here are the details: 

At 11:02 AM EST, I noticed that we were at the upper range of a wedge pattern so I bought the 0DTE $439 PUTS for $0.29. My invalidation point and stop loss was set to $0.19, which was just above SPY's high of day at that point. The problem is that I entered the trade at the top of the wedge pattern but I had an invalidation point/stop loss above the high of day. So as price stayed just inside the upper range of the wedge pattern for the next 45 minutes, my invalidation point got further and further away due to theta burning. This meant I had to move my stop loss to $0.14 in order to maintain my initial invalidation point. As a result, I took a bigger loss than I should have once I finally got stopped out.

My Big Mistake: I based my entry off the wedge trend line so my invalidation point should have been a candle close above the trend line and NOT the high of day. If I was using the high of day as my invalidation point, I should have waited for an entry that was much closer to the high of day. Here's a little video explaining the trade and the mistake that I made: 

Favorite YouTube Playlist This Week

Even though I've put hundreds of hours into learning technical analysis over the last two months, I still find it valuable to rewatch beginner technical analysis videos. Doing this reinforces all of the key concepts plus I find that I still pick up on new concepts that I overlooked when I first started studying TA.

This week, I watched a YouTube playlist titled "Introduction to Technical Analysis" by TheChartGuys and it was excellent. The instructor does a very nice job of explaining things like support and resistance trading strategies, trendline trading strategies, and chart pattern recognition. I especially enjoyed two videos at the end titled "NVDA Trade Examples" and "NIO Trade Review". Both provided great examples of real-world trades using the concepts taught in the playlist.

That's it for this week. Hopefully, I have some greener numbers to report on next week but either way, I'll be sure to come with all of my best tips and learning lessons. 

- Eric