Today Monday at noon I was closing the markets, noticing how oil and pretty much everything else, excepting bonds, keep growing in percentage returns since the middle of may.

 

I glanced to my K closings and realized that I was predicting bearish patterns for oil and for the SP500. I was absolutely wrong, and the ugliest part was that I never realized how wrong and for how long I maintained during the 2nd part of may.

 

Finishing this daily routine I went to check out the “spec” label in my email to see what the traders in the boston group were saying.

 

There was this email of this folk who asked about how to keep a trading journal without an existing strategy. The basic answer for everybody was that it makes no sense to keep a journal if you don’t use a strategy.

 

If you keep a trading journal without strategy, what you are witting down is your pain and self regretting with no proposition of improving. It’s pretty much, in catholic terms, to make the sacrament of reconciliation without a plan of abandoning that virus of sin.

 

Some of the answers of the fellow traders were somewhat like “my journal is ‘did i follow my plan?'”

That makes much more sense because if you followed your plan and losses aroused, then what you can do is to study if there is a change in the pattern you were dancing or just a business-as-usual stop loss.

 

This is to say that I am falling in this problem too because I have been trying to write market predictions in my journal without any strategy in hand.

 

That is the reason why I will create self-expectations based only on indicators making paper trades and curing the databases.

That is why, as they say, Plan your trade and trade your plan.