Blowing up my account

Quick disclosure: this is a personal trading journal, not investment advice. I trade at tastytrade with my own money. No affiliate links here, no broker or prop firm deals. Read the full disclaimer.

Trading Journey, week of July 8 to 12, 2024

The five daily entries below are my journal from that week, exactly as I typed them at the time. Nothing in them has been reworded, corrected or added to. Everything written in 2026, including the takeaways, the charts and the note at the end, sits in its own section and says so.

Monday

I don't know why I can't help getting in on the action on market open, but it almost always puts me in the red immediately. I go with the trend, get stopped out, try to reverse right away, then NQ goes the opposite way.

Then I spend the next half hour twiddling my thumbs hoping I can break even. And when I get the chance, I don't close and reposition. I try to go for more green. It's stupid.

Better to just wait a few minutes and see where the lows (or highs are) and go from there.

By 11:30 AM and I'm at break even, then I got stop loss hunted, so had to reposition again. Chase two long green candles and ended up in the red almost immediately as soon as it filled.

I'm widening my stop loss at 20630 and placing a TP order at 20675 which will get me at around 3% profit for the day.

How consecutive green days affect your trading mentality

• when there have been two to three consecutive green days, you start widening your stop losses and profit targets because you don't want to feel the pain of leaving a lot of money on the table
• when the market inevitably reverses, you're slow to adjust and take advantage of what's in front of you: a clear downtrend
• you might be down big at the start of the day if you jumped in at market open, then break-even before lunch
• this is when you need to reposition! Close those contracts, wait for a pullback, and tighten up those stop losses and profit targets because shit is gonna get volatile
• Adjust your mentality to a volatile market again before it takes your money. Stop waiting for the market to come back to you cause it might never happen again for the day.
• And you're just gonna end up staring at a huge loss that could get even bigger

Ok, it's past 1PM and I've set my stop loss and profit target.
If I end red, I end red, but I live to fight another day. Time to get outside and try to enjoy the day.

The fucked up thing about today was that I could have ended up green if I was in front of my computer. The market just went on this fantastic V-shaped recovery that could have erased my losses and made me money.

But not meant to be. I couldn't stop thinking about it all night. If I'm not careful, this might affect my mentality going into tomorrow.

Tuesday

Spoiler alert: It did affect my mentality and made me go full tilt.

Fuck this market. Fuck everything.
I keep chasing highs. Shorting lows. I need to sit still and do the opposite of my instincts because it is just not going well for me this week.
I put tight stops and not make money.
I make wide stops and lose more money.
The volatility is insane. I might have to rethink my whole strategy, if I even have one.

Today I already made money and then removed my stop loss when the market went against me.
Which turned into an $800 loss for today before I got frustrated and walked away.

Of course, I mentioned yesterday that I had a frustrated losing mentality going into today. I might have to do some meditation and yoga in the morning to calm myself down before starting my trading day. I'll try that tomorrow and see if that works.

Huge loss today.

Wednesday

Almost tilted again today. I got up around $500 to start the day then lost it all, with a $300 loss around 11 AM.
The downtrend again started at 10 AM today, which I guess coincided with Jerome Powell speaking, and ended at 11 AM.

Since I was already tilted, I set a limit order for /NQ at 20710 and a stop loss at 20695. I can't believe it actually got there and my order filled at 11 AM and almost breached my stop loss before it started climbing back up.

I feel good: ended at $620 profit for the day. Not touching it again until tomorrow.

What worked today:
After a sleepless night, what I kept thinking about was tighter stop losses, smaller wins, and leave when you're up.

What's funny is that 4 minutes after I finally closed out my contract and said I was done, the market literally melted up while I was eating lunch.

When the past two days it always went down and hit my stop loss

I left $2,700 on the table. But who's to say I wouldn't have closed out before reaching the top?

This is another unhealthy way of looking at things, which led to my big red days at the start of the week. What if it melted down instead in the afternoon? Then I would have been really glad that I set a stop loss.

There is a CPI report coming out in the morning. Going to be volatile again so I might have to sit it out and watch the trend before going in.

Thursday

Blew up my account...
I made the cardinal sin of removing my stop loss because I was already down $700 in the morning and thought the market was going back up.

I remember thinking, surely /NQ won't go down more than 200 points in one day.

Well...today was the day. It went down 400 fucking points.

I lost $7,000 before I said, alright fuck it, I'm done, I'm out.

Crazy.

Before the end of the day, when I saw what I thought the actual bottom was, I went back to where I was most comfortable: sold a a put ratio spread to capture some upside (if any) if /NQ bounces back tomorrow.

I even doubled down and bought a couple of ITM calls.

It fucking hurts, I'm numb. All my profit for the year has been wiped out.

I started looking for jobs again. I started thinking of ways to make money in the short term. I thought about quitting and said this just wasn't for me.

But I just spent a very fucking expensive lesson and I'm not going to quit.

I'll reset this month, put in some money from my retirement account, and work my way back up.

Friday

It looks like doubling down on a reversal is working out so far this morning.

I don't have any buying power left to trade /NQ or /MNQ because of my huge loss yesterday, but I'm up more than $1,000 so far from my put ratio spread and calls.

Next week, I'll put some money back in and and bring down my sizing by just trading /MNQ to build back that confidence.

Well, I ended the day just up $570. Today might be a dead cat bounce with more red days ahead next week.

This week was a disastrous week. The inevitable has happened: I blew up my account up.

I'm going to lay off trading for a bit next week. Definitely going to be more cautious before entering trades and tightening up my stop loss.

What the records actually say

Written in 2026. None of this was in the journal that week.

I left the Takeaways heading empty that Friday and never went back to it. So here is what I can reconstruct now, two years on, from the account export rather than from memory.

The numbers I typed at the time were not right, and the direction they were wrong in is the interesting part. Tuesday I walked away thinking I was down $800. Going back through the fills it was $1,830. Wednesday I wrote down $620; it was $825. I was guessing while tilted, and I guessed low both times.

Thursday was one trade. One contract, bought /NQ at 20,890.50, sold at 20,550.00, 340.5 points against me, ($6,810). I took four others that day and together they cost $838, which is an ordinary bad day and does nothing. The fifth had no stop on it.

One contract, and the damage is just the point move times what a point is worth. If that conversion is not automatic for you yet, I wrote up where the math goes wrong.

Five weeks of grinding, from 4 June to 5 July, netted $2,749 across 23 sessions, 15 green and 8 red. Monday to Wednesday had already given back $2,200 of it. Thursday took the rest and $7,098 more.

Takeaways

Also 2026. I did not write these that Friday, though I wish I had.

1. The stop loss. Every other mistake that week cost me hundreds. Pulling the stop cost $6,810. Being wrong is not the problem, I am wrong constantly and it is survivable. I removed the thing that makes it survivable.

1. Tilt carries over. Monday's loss is not what did the damage. Lying awake about it is. That set up Tuesday, and Tuesday set up the head I brought in on Thursday.

1. Size. You cannot grind back out of a hole you dug with size. Five weeks to net $2,749, one session to lose $7,648.

1. "Surely /NQ won't go down more than 200 points in one day." The market has no idea what I think is reasonable.

Editor's note, August 2026

Spoiler: he quit.

Not that Friday, and not dramatically. Laid off for a week like he said, came back smaller, ground the same account down for another four months. Then the entries stop. There was nothing left to write that wasn't the same entry again.

Somewhere in there I stopped opening the journal. Then I got a full-time job, and that did more for my risk management than the tighter stops or the meditation I promised myself on Wednesday morning. A salary. Waiting for a clear trend is a lot easier when the trade isn't paying rent.

I'm putting this up two years late because I went through the old drafts and this was the only one I never posted. I posted the good weeks that June. I posted a losing day that June and called it a gut punch. Not this one.

The five daily entries are exactly as I typed them, typos included. Everything from "What the records actually say" onward is 2026, and I have kept it separate on purpose: the whole point of the week is what I thought at the time, and correcting that in place would delete the evidence.

I had already blown up an account in 2022. Every rule I broke that week, I knew. I'd typed most of them into this same journal in the previous five weeks.

Two years on I did a smaller version of the same thing through an FOMC week, and got out of it with my account intact.

Trading again now. Smaller, rules I actually keep, and I publish the tests that come back negative.

Any information in this post is not intended as investment or financial advice. All information found here, including any ideas, opinions, views, predictions, forecasts, commentaries, suggestions, or any stock picks, are for informational, entertainment, and educational purposes only. Growing Tendies does not accept any liability for any loss or damage which is incurred from any loss of money on a trade. All trades are done using the tastytrade platform.

I trade futures and options at tastytrade with my own money. I earn nothing if you open an account there. The link is just so you know where these fills come from.

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