I’ve genuinely traded a lot less this stretch, largely because school has been insanely busy — no time to trade, let alone time to write reviews.
I ran my positions pretty full last time in May, close to 80%. Position management, on a long horizon, might be an entropy-increasing process — sometimes you’re just idle and want to buy a little something, without thinking it through enough. That might be a problem.
Taking the L
The start of June opened with a sucker punch. On Thursday, amid the Broadcom chaos, the market somehow printed a new high right at the open, then my account closed down 2% — I thought I’d luckily escaped. Come Friday the account promptly ate a limit-down. I was up late cramming for finals at the time; seeing the carnage in the small hours, I picked up a bit of the 5-prefix DRAM. If my position management had been better, I could have bought a lot more.
I’ve realized that how much you panic is basically how unexpected it was. If the flush had been within expectations, there’d be basically no panic — Friday’s flush was completely reasonable. And if you don’t panic, your execution basically doesn’t deform.
Taking the L Again
Monday first brought a small bounce, all quite reasonable. Tuesday and Wednesday’s violent flush, though, was completely out of left field.
Dodging CPI might explain some of it, but when the CPI print dropped pre-market Wednesday, core CPI actually came in slightly below expectations — and the market still flushed hard. The good news: since my circadian rhythm runs entirely on the exam schedule, I shut everything down on Wednesday right after reading the CPI data.
Waking at 5 a.m. to check the market, all I had was confusion — I skipped the panic stage entirely.
Swing Trading
The friend next door threw in some U (USDT) to practice trading — perpetually going in at the minimum size with 10x leverage — and promptly confirmed that they’re hopeless at trading. My read: at the market’s current bounce speed, swing trading is still too hard, at least too hard for me.
Meanwhile I don’t mind left-side accumulation, because I believe in the fundamentals of what I buy — at least it’s not Hang Seng Tech — so the win rate doesn’t look bad. The DRAM I bottom-fished last Friday also helped my account break its previous high this Wednesday, even with the Nasdaq still 2.5% below its high.
Enough said — Trump just shilled INTC again, time to go count money.
Stay tuned for more updates on my trading journey!
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