LC Trade on Mar 12, 2021 10:24 from wolfgtweb: Tradervue User Stock Trades.

I am terribly embarrassed to even share this. But I need to be taught a lesson. This should never happen. I went short on this at 13.81. Had a stop at 14.01 in case it popped. It began to drop as I thought it would.

Mistake #1. Instead of just moving my stop down to get out, I cancelled my stop and placed a target at 13.65. The price actually reached 13.65 on the money, but my order was not one that got filled. It immediately bounced. I was watching it closely and it popped to 14 but got immediately rejected. I figured if it came back down to 13.80, I would add. It did, so I added. It took my money and immediately bounced. At this point, I was a little ticked. First it reached my target and didn't fill then it allowed me to add and immediately bounced. This is the point that it all went wrong. My emotions took over and a loss was not something I was going to accept. I felt robbed.

Mistake #2. I had stops set in my head, but every time they approached, I talked myself out of actually placing them. I spent the rest of the day watching my situation get worse and worse. My final hope was that power hour would bring the sell off I had been waiting on. But when it broke out of the trending wedge it was in, I called it and finally took the loss.

Such an idiot. From this day forward, I am not allowed to have mental stops. Period. Unfortunately, I have made this mistake too many times. I am hoping that putting it out there will finally make me wake up and do this right.

UPDATE DUE TO COMMENTS. FURTHER ANALYSIS.

Questions about the technical reason I even got into the trade have come up. Well, good point. I guess that was mistake #1. I trade the 5 minute chart and my normal setup for a short position is to see it breakdown through the 9EMA and then pullback to the 9EMA. Then I get in at the breakdown below the latest pullback candle. I saw the pullback from the 9:50 spike and then a false breakout at 10:10. Then a hard snap back to the 9EMA and through it (a bit). That is when I saw it and thought that I could get the beginning of the move if it broke down through the 9EMA and past the previous low. Which it did. When it broke the previous low (red arrow in the image below), I got in. It then dropped 17 cents. I should have realized this was not the ideal setup and taken profit and walked away. Looking back at it, daytradersdaily is right in the comments. If I would have played this normally and waited for the breakdown and confirmation, I would have never been in the trade to begin with. This is a prime example of not waiting for the trade to develop. The true setup would have been a pulback two candles later and then a breakdown, but that didn't happen. Instead, it broke back through the 9EMA and that would have ended the pattern.