The $100 That Cost Everything
By Tuesday I was at $1,200 across all five accounts trading 2MES.
That number matters because three weeks ago I was rebuilding from scratch. The Trump-Iran news hit around 7am Monday, ES spiked over 200 points in five minutes, and I was positioned right. $1,200 became $1,400 by the middle of the week. I should have closed the laptop and gone to bed.
Instead, at 6pm Wednesday, when the market reopened after close, I went back in.
The target was $1,500 per account. One hundred dollars more per account. That was the number I decided was worth staying up for.
The first couple of trades didn’t go the right way. Then the spiral started. I stayed at the screen from 6pm EST trying to claw it back, adjusting, re-entering, and somewhere in there I switched from 2MES to 1ES because I wanted to finish it faster and get to bed. That switch made everything worse. By 5am Thursday morning all five accounts were blown.
I took the day off work. Headache, no sleep, twelve hours of staring at a screen with nothing to show for it except five blown accounts and a restock order for five new evaluation accounts.
Friday I bought the new evaluations and started again, back to the rules.
Two of my five Behavioral KPIs got broken that night. Trading Time and Contract Size.
What’s strange is that I don’t have a clean explanation for why. I could say I needed the money but that’s not true. There’s no hidden pressure I can point to. I knew the rules. I broke them anyway and kept going deeper into a hole I dug voluntarily.
The contract size shift is what finished me. If I had stayed on 2MES I would still have the accounts, probably with a real drawdown but intact. Switching to 1ES in the middle of a spiral, at around 2am, because I wanted to move faster and go to bed, that’s not a trade decision. That’s desperation logic.
I’ve broken the contract size rule three times in the past month. Three times sounds like a small number until you realize once is enough to blow everything, which is exactly what happened.
The KPI system is doing its job in one sense. I can see the pattern. I can track when the rule breaks and look at it clearly afterward. But the contract size rule as it was written had a flaw.
It said: stick to your pre-defined contract size.
That’s not specific enough. Pre-defined can shift under pressure, apparently. It shifted in the early hours of Thursday morning.
So the rule is changing. Contract size is now MES. Not “pre-defined.” Not “appropriate for conditions.” MES. That’s the only answer on the KPI going forward. Yes or No.
Next week’s edition will show whether that held.