I shorted fairly quickly and took a partial but held on longer to scale out at some of the predefined levels. I'm quite happy with myself for trusting my plan and knowing where I would exit if the sentiment changed, this level of comfort really helps to hold runners for further targets and worked well today. I felt the entire time that I could have gone in a little heavier, however, the goal right now is to keep it small, tight, instill correct habits and (most importantly?) log the errors. Nothing quite as embarrassing as typing your fuck ups online.
To the fucked up part. I was stalking a long once price closed the gap as I'm sure many other traders were. Unfortunately I hesitated too much and made more of an impulsive entry as opposed to waiting for a pull back and got stopped out - twice. Took a little more heat than I should have which is of course a no no at this stage. Typically in the past I was ok giving something a little more room and even adding if there had been a large move and I was expecting a reversal. This of course caused me to shaft myself on more than one occasion and my profitable trades didn't outweigh the losing ones. I still believe that it is a viable setup but I most certainly need to do more work on how I will enter and how much risk I should take to allow me to capture an appropriate amount of gain. For now I will reduce my size by 33%, take a scale at 0.10c and hold for whatever further target(s) I have for that day.
I was also stopped out of most of the remainder swing longs I had on ($YELP, $BIDU).
End of the day was very slightly down when the swing longs were taken into account. Bit of a bummer but knowing how bad shit can get when one isn't on the ball I'm perfectly ok with the (few hundred bucks) draw down. Removing either error trades to the long side would have made it an ok day, reinforcing that it is so critical to have a plan ready with at least some basic rules to protect yourself. Just plain lousy prep work and awful execution. I can live with it providing I make less as time goes on.
Another thing I want to note is anxiety levels. For most of the day it was close to zero. The usual anxiety/anticipation on entering and those few minutes that determine one's scale then nothing. I believe this was due to having spent time working out reasonable and likely targets before the market opened. The only other time it came on was during the long (error) trades.
Using a smaller position size is also essential (imo) to begin holding for larger moves.
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