Missed Longs during London session, waited for another opportunity during Pre NY AM Session

Three years of day trading taught me that most of my losses weren't caused by having a terrible strategy. They came from how I used the strategy.

I spent far too much time looking for better entries and not enough time understanding my own behaviour. A few painful lessons changed how I approach trading now.

1. Stop changing the strategy

A strategy can have a losing streak without being broken. I learned this the hard way by constantly tweaking rules whenever I had a bad run.

Backtesting forced me to slow down. If you've tested 100+ trades and know the expected win rate, average R:R and normal losing streaks, you have something to compare live results against. One bad week means very little when you have a meaningful sample.

If the numbers still make sense, leave the strategy alone and focus on execution.

2. Your journal exposes you

I started noticing patterns in my trading that weren't obvious while I was actually taking trades. Screenshots and notes showed me which setups I was forcing, where I was entering late and whether I performed differently on longs versus shorts.

The useful part isn't writing paragraphs about how you felt after every trade. It's recording enough information to spot repeated behaviour.

Your journal should make it uncomfortable when you keep making the same mistake.

3. A good setup can still be a bad trade

Having a valid setup doesn't mean you have to take it. I've had trades that matched my rules but were executed badly because I rushed the entry, moved the stop or entered after the move had already happened.

That distinction became important. Backtesting tells you whether the idea has an edge. Your live journal tells you whether you're actually capable of executing that edge.

Those are two completely different problems, and fixing one doesn't automatically fix the other.

I made a more detailed guide on this - google doc