Lessons for fellow traders: Risk management and adapting to changing market conditions are key to survival
99% it's buying a few selling trades. Last month was so good, yes, I do trade on a setup I gained good confidence from previous months. I went somewhat aggressive last month and made good profits (happy to see a lot of green days overall), but if you look at May and June, most of the days I was in the green, but a few red days wiped out the profits gained (some were BTST which yielded negative, and I'm no longer taking BTSTs now).
So, this is a live example of how risk management helps us, so always remember not to ignore it. I know we might follow it all the time, but the one time we miss it, it will have a huge impact, so always try to follow it as a system.
The main thing for this post is that the setup I've traded for the last 5 to 6 months hasn't been good this month. Yeah, I traded this month with the same setup, but 70% of trades were negative. I realized lately that my setup needs high volatility. Don't stick to your strategies. In my case, trading the same setup would be foolish now; even my confidence has gotten lower. But yesterday, I sat and did some Backtesting and rewriting the setup, the concepts are the same, but entry confirmations got updated with respect to VIX. The main difference is low volatility from August, and CAS got introduced. I feel adapting to market conditions is so important.