A wild 200-pt day

On the face of it, any 200-pt day ought to feel good. Afterall, if I could average 200 pts a week, I would do fantastically well. But sometimes such a day doesn't leave you feeling good - instead it is a case of the "ones that got away"

A quiet-ish start to the day - a couple of tiny wins off the early morning trades. I generally start work at 6:00 by putting on whatever position would be on at that time. Occasionally the pre-market is exactly what continues on into the main trading day. If you do nothing at the start of the trading session you can sit on the sidelines and watch a giant trend run all morning that you are not in. But for the last few weeks, the early trades have been nothing special

Then, around 9:00, two superb trades. Sells in both US equities and crude. By 1:00, then trades have produced over 350 pts of profit and with more than half the trading day left, I am wondeirng whether this could be an exceptional day - always a bad thing to start thinking

Sometimes the trading systems "just" get hit for a reversal. It might be only a matter of a few marginal points that cause the trade. At 1:45 a move was just sufficient to flip me to long US equities going into the open. A 2-pt smaller move would have prevented the flip. An hour later, this trade has lost about 80pts, as has a corresponding long in crude.

If the market had reversed after its big fall and regained the losses, I would have had a red letter day. As it was, by late afternoon I am only up 100-pts and am not feeling at my best. Then we are hit with a 10-minute power cut and my stress explodes - what is happening to my trading positions? Panic, rushing round checking our fuse boxes. It is not our problem and power comes back on. But then it takes another 5 minutes to sort out the PCs and the internet. As I come back online, crude is giving a sell signal, which I take and forget to reverse - so I only exit the long. Another 30-pts gain disappears and I am not happy.

But early evening, both equities and crude rally and I pick up 60 pts in the former and 108 in the latter. So the day ends at around +200, which would otherwise be a good day

My trade exit tonight occurs at 8:00pm. I am really exhausted from the psychological impact of the changing day. If the 2-pt move in US equities hadn't happened, I would have made an extra 125-pts on the short and not lost the 80 on the long. And worse still - just after 8:00, both markets begin to move down again and I would have picked up another 120-pts if I had stayed trading the last hour. Those "extras" that I could, on another day, have picked up, were worth over 300 pts. I was within a whisker of a 500-pt day, what would have been the best ever (excluding the flash crash day)

So somewhat battered and bruised from the day. But on the plus side, I did manage to correctly apply the trade entry methodology throughout the day (unlike Tuesday). Calculations show that this gained me over 100 pts versus the "raw" system

More philosophically, I am pondering on the trading aspects of "the ones that got away" - perhaps I should pursue this trading-fishing analogy further