Monday I lost $379.66 on three trades and wrote a post about how two Canadian dollar contracts were never tradeable inside a $50 risk budget. I ended that post with five rules for September. Rule number one was: audit the entire watchlist tonight for 1R fit.
Tuesday I made +$288.10 and scored myself 6/6 on discipline.
I also never did the audit. And two of the five trades I took were in the exact same category of instrument that cost me Monday. One of them lost 3.46R. The other one won.
That’s the whole post.
Account snapshot — Day 17
- Balance: $48,384.08 → $48,672.18
- Day P/L: +$288.10 across 5 trades (3 winners, 2 losers)
- Maximum Loss Limit: $48,000.00 — drawdown cushion $672.18
- Risk per trade: $50 (1R). Daily cap: $250 (5R)
- Discipline score: 6/6, Process band
- Cumulative payouts: $0 / $100,000
The cushion moved from $384.08 to $672.18. That is real breathing room and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But it came from one trade, and it did not come from a change in how I size.
The five trades
1. MCL long — 86.42 to 90.29, +$385.48 (+7.71R)
Micro crude, entered Sunday evening at 5:38 PM, closed Tuesday midday at 12:28 PM. Journal note: “clean gap fill.” Held 18 hours and 50 minutes and let the whole move run. This is the best single trade of the challenge by a wide margin.
2. M2K long — 2,962.40 to 2,947.50, -$75.72 (-1.51R)
Micro Russell, entered Sunday 6:19 PM, stopped out Tuesday 2:27 AM. Slightly over 1R after fees, which is normal slippage on a micro. No complaints.
3. 6J short — 0.0062595 to 0.0062490, +$127.03 (+2.54R)
Full-size Japanese yen, entered Monday 11:20 PM, closed Tuesday 6:32 AM. A winner. Hold that thought.
4. MYM short — 53,128 to 53,077, +$24.28 (+0.49R)
Micro Dow. Journal note: “moved stop up, move would have worked.” Trailed myself out of a bigger win, which is a real but minor leak.
5. 6B short — 1.3526 to 1.3553, -$172.97 (-3.46R)
Full-size British pound, entered Tuesday 7:01 AM, stopped out at 8:00 AM. One hour. Biggest loser of the day by more than double.
The arithmetic I said I’d run and didn’t
The CME British pound future (6B) is a 62,500 GBP contract. Minimum tick is 0.0001, worth $6.25 per tick. My 1R is $50. Fifty divided by six and a quarter is eight ticks of stop room.
My 6B stop was 27 ticks wide. That’s roughly 3.4 times what one contract permits at my risk level — which is exactly what the journal’s R column says: -3.46R.
Here’s the part that makes it worse than Monday. Unlike the Canadian dollar, a micro British pound contract exists. The M6B is a 6,250 GBP contract at $0.625 per tick (CME Micro FX Futures, M6B contract specifications). The same 27-tick stop on one M6B costs $16.88. I could have taken that exact trade, that exact stop, at two contracts and still been inside 1R.
So the trade wasn’t wrong. The read wasn’t wrong. The instrument wasn’t even off-limits. I just clicked the wrong symbol and paid $173 for a $34 idea.
The winner was the same mistake
This is the part I’d skip if I were writing this to look good.
The 6J short is the same full-size FX contract structure — a $6.25 tick on the CME yen future. The 21-tick move I captured was worth $131.25, or about 2.6R. I did not size that trade to plan either. It just happened to go my way.
Add the two full-size FX trades together: +$127.03 and -$172.97 = -$45.94. Two trades, both outside my risk plan, swinging six R between them, and the net contribution to the day was negative.
Now the three micros: -$75.72, +$24.28, +$385.48 = +$334.04.
Every dollar of today’s green came from the instruments that fit inside my risk budget. The instruments that don’t fit cost me money on a day I felt like I was in total control.
Process check — 6/6, and I don’t think I earned it
I scored all six boxes green today, including “risk followed” and “max loss respected.” Look at the trade log next to it and one line reads -3.46R.
Those two things cannot both be true. What actually happened is that the day finished green, so nothing felt like it needed flagging. That is the scorecard failing at the exact job it exists to do — measuring process independent of outcome. A green P/L quietly bought me a clean sheet I didn’t earn.
On Day 16 I marked risk followed as “no” and took a 4/6. Same behavior today. Different score. The only variable was the result.
Where the challenge stands after 17 days
- 17 trading days, 134 trades, 7.9 trades per day
- Net P/L: -$1,325.71
- Win rate 38.8%, average R per trade -0.20
- Average discipline 4.82/6 — 11 Process days, 2 Stand-down days
- 6 logged rule breaks (0.35/day), journal completion 100%
- Best day +$336.49 (Day 15). Worst day -$719.27 (Day 13)
The broker’s trailing 30-day view backs up the same story from a different angle: 68 winners against 108 losers, profit factor 0.75, average win $59.22 against average loss $49.58 for a 1.19 ratio. The average win got bigger this week — that’s crude oil doing the lifting. The average loss barely moved.
Profit factor 0.75 means for every dollar I lose I make back seventy-five cents. That’s not a broken strategy. It’s a strategy with a leak on the loss side, and I’ve now traced that leak to the same source three separate times: gold on Day 9, Canadian dollar on Day 16, British pound today.
The bonus check problem
Imagine you overspend by three or four hundred dollars every month. You know it. You’ve said you’ll fix it. Then a surprise bonus lands and the month closes in the black.
Nothing about your spending changed. The bonus didn’t fix anything — it just removed the pressure that was going to force the conversation. And because the month ended positive, you file it away as handled.
That’s Day 17. The crude oil trade was the bonus check. It covered a $173 sizing error and still left $288 on the table, and in doing so it let me hand myself a 6/6 and move on. If MCL had chopped instead of running, today is red, the scorecard is a 4, and I’m writing a much more urgent post.
The behavior is identical either way. Only the receipt is different.
What changes tomorrow
Not a new rule. The same rule, actually executed this time.
- The watchlist audit happens tonight, before any orders. Every symbol, ATR stop in ticks times dollars per tick. Anything where one contract can’t hold a stop inside $50 gets replaced with its micro or removed.
- 6B is replaced by M6B. 6J is replaced by MJY. Full-size FX comes off the platform entirely at this account size. Gold and 6C stay off the menu.
- Score the process before I look at the P/L. Fill the discipline boxes from the trade log’s R column, not from how the day felt.
- Retroactive fix: today’s scorecard gets corrected to reflect the 3.46R trade, and the rule break log — which still ends August 27 — gets the Day 16 and Day 17 rows written in.
Cushion is $672.18. That’s better than it was Monday and it’s still less than two bad sizing decisions.
If you’ve had a green day recently that you scored well and quietly know you didn’t earn, go pull the R column on your worst trade of that day. Not the P/L — the R. That number doesn’t care how the day ended.
