026: Mental Burnout & Resilience-- No More Trading Beyond 10:30 AM EST
Earned 100 pips and wiped these gains out all in one day. Like learning from a webinar how to trade short everytime a Hummingbird appears in bollinger bands, it's also very eye opening for me to realize the signs of burnout and how everything goes downhill because of it.
Today, I should've taken it easy and stopped trading at 10:30 AM EST (lesson for me: never, never trade near and during the lunch time in NY session, or prepared to get ambushed).
Let's rewind time a bit-- looking back, the reason why I've overtraded was trying to compensate for not being able to trade yesterday and earlier (I usually start at 2:00AM EST, but today, started at 7:30 AM EST because I've slept some more). Had a bad migraine attack yesterday which I think was caused by lack of sleep (went home late on Sunday night--actually early morning of Monday already, heh--after watching the last show of The Martian for the day, and had few hours sleep last Saturday as well from designing a gown). I think the bad migraine was also caused by constant panic after watching a video about the 2008 collapse and learning about high-frequency trading style being used by big institutions using news algorithm --if they can trade at the speed of light with the help of keywords and news, I'm doomed at my day trading attempts.
I honestly do feel troubled about that, and feel like I should stick to my old strategy of using fundamentals and doing swing trading instead. But, nah. I just have to relax first, deal with my burnout and go back experimenting with day trading using 15 min chart this time instead of 1 min (less stress), and day trading for only 2 hours-- 8:30 - 10:30 AM EST.
I'm currently addicted to this band, Phoria. Also chilling out listening to Olafur Arnalds and Of Monsters and Men. I just love them!
Got delighted to discover that there's an episode in Traderspodcast about burnout, as well as this article in Babypips on how to deal with it.
In case I get burnout in the future which isn't coming from trading (but will affect my performance in trading nevertheless), I've bookmarked this self-help page as well.
Some interesting stuff which are more hardcore than above:
I wanna watch The Martian again also and observe how Matt Damon survived against all odds.
"In your face, Neil Armstrong."
