It looked like it would keep going up, but the price action soon stalled and headed to the downside. It was on the NQ E-mini and Martha had placed a market order as an extended candle on the 30-minute chart had blasted off and had continued to go upward. Martha had been trading for several months and believed that the seminars she had taken had provided enough of an education in the markets to prepare her for live trading. “How hard could it be?” she had said to herself after completing the course. She made a plan and made sure that she had a few rules.
Additionally, Martha thought that the brief instruction in the discipline of trading was more than enough because, as she put it, “I have that part handled.” There had been a number of her colleagues that had made a few ventures into the markets and she had commented to herself, “Hadn’t they done well?” It didn’t matter to her that when she spoke with her friends even they had admitted that they really did not have a plan and simply “went with the crowd.”Martha was not fazed by that admission and barreled forward with an unbridled confidence that she would prevail. However, this confidence was not based upon a foundation of competence and was established before she had a string of losses.
Therefore this latest turn in the price action left her feeling confused, frustrated, fragmented and frazzled. She couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. This stuff was supposed to be easy…wasn’t that what the seminar had intimated? Unfortunately, Martha not only lost in that NQ trade, she proceeded to lose consistently for several weeks that ended in a blown account. She blamed her failure on… Continue Reading
