Wow guys, what a roller coaster. The same thing happened yesterday that had happened the day before. When I sent out my email in the morning, the market was up and the smell of flowers was in the air, and then later in the day the market absolutely tanked. Today it jumped back up again to start the morning, but we are very clearly in a volatile market state.
I personally had an emotional reaction at the very end of the trading day yesterday. The market was driving down so forcefully and took out the stoplosses on both my MES futures positions, and I felt a strong jolt of anger. Something that helped me regain my composure is that I asked myself, "How do I WANT to respond to situations like this?"
It's like I have a very real choice here. Do I want to flip out and punch holes in walls and scream? Or do I want to accept the situation, knowing that I'm following the back-tested plan in lock step and that in reality I am physically safe, and instead be calm and cool about it. I certainly prefer the latter!
In my case, I thought about how early in the day a lot of trades reached their profit targets, and I thought about how lucky that was. Because if those trades had come up just short of their profit targets before the market tanked, then my account balance would have been much lower to end the day. And just like that, I started to feel a bit of gratitude in my chest. I had a choice in that situation, and I decided to focus my awareness on something I could be grateful for. It's hard to do! And there is a part of me that doesn't want to let go of the anger sometimes. But ultimately we really can choose how we respond to the emotions that come up during trading.
In the main account, I bought an MES futures position this morning that already reached its profit target. It normally doesn't happen that fast! But the MES futures price marched straight upward out of the gate this morning. The SPXL equivalent came really close to hitting its profit target, but did not quite get there and has since come back down. The SPXL equivalent is meant to be a mirror of the MES futures, but it's not perfectly synchronized so sometimes there is a little disparity between the positions.
I also bought stock for NVDA and COST in the main account. Those trades came right off the watch list. I simply had buy limit orders set up for both of those using the "Potential Entry Price" from the watch list, and both orders filled right when the market opened. In that account, I also picked up options for ETSY (it's a double down trade).
In the extra options account I picked up options for ETSY, NVDA, XLNX, and QCOM. In the low-priced account I bought stock for PUBM.
I have a lot of options positions that are reaching their time limits today. I'll be closing all of those near the end of the trading day today as usual (I normally close them within the last 15 minutes or so of normal market hours).
One last thing: I had the wrong "close by" dates on some stocks in the main account. They were set to be one day too long. I fixed them this morning. They are for trades I just made in the last couple days.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.