huge mistake

The main reason that I created this blog is to help myself pinpoint my trading mistakes. Along the way of documenting my progress, I can easily pinpoint any mistake that keeps popping up. There's a saying that I learned in marketing by peter drunker, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

So a very big mistake that I keep finding myself committing is:

I know the reason and criteria needed to enter a trade/position. But I always find it hard to control myself to wait for the right moment because of the possibility of missing a potential move.

This mistake also contains another mistake of trying to catch a good price point. Many times it counts for trying to catch a falling knife. Yes, it did bounce subsequent to my entry point. But I need to control myself to distinguish between the differences: am I aiming for the bounce trade or is it part of accumulating a larger position? if it's a bounce trade, then i need to go in with a bigger size and a tighter stop loss. if it's part of building a larger position then I shouldn't have entered it because I think it's going to bounce a few cents, I need to wait for a better basing pattern for a bigger potential move. And that means forgoing many of those little bounces in the context of waiting for a more reliable basing pattern. That also means, I may not be getting the best price in any one addition to a whole position because how would I know if this little bounce will be the bottom? So the goal is to get the best AVERAGE price for the whole position and having the maximum # of shares to sell just before the big move occurs.

This mistake is a lack of discipline. And it has popped up countless times. So it's time to manage it big time.