Thanks to all for the advice and best wishes. You are both correct that I should set my initial target at following the plans I set out. Fortunately for me I have a leg up on most people in this respect...I am very methodical by nature.

In fact, the main lessons I learned from my first month were:
- Have a plan going in
- Do not deviate from the plan
- Do not trade on emotion

The not trading on emotion will be simple for me with my plans in place since the only decisions I will make is which trades to enter in on. These trades will only be from the approximately 1-15 that meet my current screens each day. The screens are purely statistically driven, so I am only allowing a small amount of emotion to select from the valid options.

Since one of my main failures in the first month was decisions based on emotion, I see value in not doing this. Also since I already lost 42k in investments (catalyst to me taking charge of it myself), a large portion of the fear has been taken out of me, the only barrier I may have is greed.

The Pangolin-Z system has a target profit and a stop loss, so as long as I adhere to that, there will be no emotion driven decisions. So far so good with that one.

The BB Squeeze and Aroon Cross systems have no set targets, but a set method to move the stop loss, so no emotional driven decisions in these systems as well as long as the plan is stuck to. Still in the early testing stages for this, but I do not forsee myself deviating from the plans after seeing what happens when I do that in the first month.


In reviewing my initial plan, I did discover a flaw with my money management rules. I have limits for how large of a position I should take, but the initial plan did not have any rules for how much total risk my trading pot will be subjected to. For this reason, I am adding 2 more rules (c and d) to help prevent a month with greater than a 5% decline in my trading pot. I will be closely monitoring the risk of my trading pot for the next month to make sure the percentages I am setting right now make sense, so they may be modified slightly in the future.