This market's tough. No secret. Are you going to bitch about it or put in the work to make the necessary adjustments? Did a few years of the market going vertical at a 45 degree angle trick you into believing this game was easy?! This game has never been easy. Its survival mindset 95% of the time. I took today away from the action to dive into my own trading and figure out what the hell I need to do better to maximize my gains. The fact is, this market is a Trader's Dream and a Textbook Swing Trader's Nightmare. There is so much opportunity out there every single day it is bewildering. But there is great volatility in this uptrend and it needs to be factored into position sizing, holding time & profit taking. I have given a shitload of PnL back these past 3 weeks. Sometimes I am taking advantage of the volatility in buying shakeouts, sometimes I am getting taken advantage of in holding too much size for a swing. Of the 15 trades I took in this time, 3 were same day stop outs. 12 worked on day 1. Of the 12 that worked on day 1, 4 were solid winners (>3R), 3 were marginal gains (0.5-1R), 2 breakeven, and 3 losers. The data tells me the 12 that worked ran an average of 4.3R before reversing back to my price. I need to look to trim a greater percentage, 50% or more, of each trade into 4-5R to keep more of my gains. $ALAB this week was a perfect example. Day 1 entry, price distance from cost, all clear to hold heavy. Day 2 big move, reaches 5R, trim 15% of the position to pay for the risk in hopes it continues and turns into a big swing. Retests the breakout level the following day, healthy retest, continue to hold. Reverses lower and stops me out marginally above my cost on day 3. Some just continue higher like $FTNT & $PLTR but these are the minority. The data is telling me I need to aggressively take profit between 4-5R and hold a smaller portion of my position for the swing. Last week I had an amazing swing in $ARM buying a 30 min pivot off the 20ema getting cushion into the close, and trimming 2/3 of that into strength at 10-17R while aiming to properly swing the rest. Great stuff. Adjustments being made. Then earlier this week ARM comes back to test the 20ema. I reload the full position. Only this time, it closes awfully and I don't have any price cushion. But, I have this last win fresh in my mind and get complacent, only to wake up to a big gap down. In this gap down I take a fat 4R loss, first time taking that big a loss all year. I need to sell the adds and get back to the smaller core holding and see what tomorrow holds. You have to be perfect to succeed in this market. Complacency is getting especially punished. I am also finding you need to be acutely aware of where the $QQQ is trading in terms of the nearest support level, which is currently the 10ema. This is not like the April lock out rally in the slightest. We have been moving higher, but strong moves soon test support in the days to follow. My PnL has been a levered version of the Q's distance from support. Gets extended to the upside, I go up big, don't sell enough, we test support, I give trades back. In the $ALAB scenario, the $SMH was extended 5% above its 10ema. While I was hopeful we would see "nothing" sort of digestive action in the days to come, I need to lose that hope and prepare for a support test in the following days by taking more profit while the getting is good. There is no way to know semi's would sell so much in the days to follow, we can only operate with the information we had at the time. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over while expecting different results. My first few years were met with such brutal market chop, there was nothing to do but make constant adjustments if you wanted to survive. Lots didn't. They didn't work hard enough. Don't be the majority on here that seemingly sit scrolling all day cheering when its easy and complaining when its hard. It's going to be hard so much more often than not. Don't get used to the breakout years. Pull up a QQQ monthly chart, and just stare at it. If we chopped for a year would it be the craziest thing? I remember one of my first trading bosses did this in early 2015 when, after years of gains, we were in a choppy uptrend similar to now. What prompted this is the change of market behavior to a more choppy uptrend along with there being talks of the Fed beginning a hiking cycle later in the year. Scared me to death. I was a pure breakout trader. Sure enough, later that August, China's market became a disaster which spilled over to our market, big time change-of-trend selloff. Then the Fed raised rates in September '15 which lead to 16 months of chop before we had a breakaway market begin again in Jan 2017. It was all monthly digestion at the end of the day from the 2009-2015 ripper. In the beginning of my career, 2013, the room was stacked with hundreds of prop traders. Breakout traders galore. It was so easy. Buy through resistance. Stop low of day. Trim and trail. After that 2015 chop began the numbers dwindled more and more to the point about 75% of the room was cleared out. The difference from the trader's who made it were the ones who worked the hardest, looked into their own trading data the most, accepted things out of their control like the underlying environment, and just looked to get better every single day. Ask yourself, are you going to be in the miniscule percentage of traders who make it big no matter what the market's doing? Or are you going to be the lazy guy bitching on social media at every turn. Do the work. Have a great weekend. 🍻