When it rains it pours

Daily Result: £296.97

Hmmm. Nowhere near the most I'm prepared to lose on a single event but even spread across two separate events dropping nearly £300 is still a pretty hefty loss. However, strange as it may sound, I'm not particularly worked up about the loss. Annoyed yes but having looked through what I did today there's no real standout errors (perhaps one minor one) that I regret making. It was just one of those days that you have to deal with from time to time where a period of trading just goes horribly wrong in just about everyway it can. And then some. I like to think the trick in these circumstances is to keep control, limit the losses and not do you bollocks in. And believe it or not, at just under a £300 daily loss I think I managed it.

I got involved in two matches from the Shanghai Masters. Nadal v Blake and Davydenko v Robredo. At one stage I was £222 red the pair in the first game and £334 red the pair in the second. So from those dreadful positions a £296.97 loss on the day suddenly doesn't seem quite so bad!

I'm not going to run through each game in detail. Suffice to say I was over £200 red the pair in each match within 4/5 games. The start of each match was just awful for me. I plotted a rough price / time graph for the start of the first game. Looking at it my entry trades were at prices I was mostly happy with in situations I was mostly happy with. The problem was the exit trades. Basically a string of points would go against me and I'll bail for a loss just in time to save what I expected to be a far bigger loss. Only for a string of points to go the other way leaving my bail price looking awful. In fact, when looking at a graph I more or less caught the worst prices to bail at more than once! With hindsight it looked like the perfect example of how not to trade!!

Anyway, I accept that just as some days everything will seem to go right for you other days you'll be reminded that it never rains but pours. I used to play a lot of poker and am familiar with the concept of variance. Not especially applicable here but still worth having a think about - especially in terms of how to deal with it. I did an entry about trading psychology a while back and when I have a bad losing day I like to have a read back through it and get that Tao of Poker book I mentioned in it off the shelf which I'll be doing tonight.

So, not a great day. Especially as the irony of it all is I fancied both the winners to win. And with Blake that was a big odds against shout. But there have been losses, both bigger and smaller, that I've been more worked up about simply because I know I made mistakes or silly errors. I don't feel I did anything too wrong today but instead was more a victim of some unsual circumstances that are bound to crop up from time to time. I know it'll happen again - hopefully not too soon! - and I hope I again manage to stay disciplined when it does.

Have a long standing appointment tomorrow afternoon so will probably miss the Ljubicic v Nalbandian game which is the one I really want to have a go at. Will probably also give the first game up the Federer v Roddick one, a miss unless the ARod gets off to a good start.

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