Today I’m feeling more confident about my trading than I’ve ever felt, and I’ve hit a new milestone – up 8 weeks in row. I’ve actually had more profitable months in the past, but my trading is just so much more consistent than it was before. I’m also trading the e-minis almost exclusively now, which just seems to work for me.

I’ve had much more profitable weeks and months in the past, but they were usually followed by losing weeks that wiped out all the P&L I had built up. And, you know what, up until a few months ago, every time I had a good day or week I just knew I would give it back sooner or later. These days I really feel like I’m not going to give it all back.

So, what am I doing differently? There are actually a few things I’ve changed up a little, but I think my consistency over the last two months is mostly about one change I’ve made. Basically, I’ve managed to convince myself that I don’t have to trade every day, or even every week.

In reality I have traded every week and almost every day – but I’ve managed to be more selective about the trades I take. And that’s all because I no longer feel that I must trade every day. I can wait as long as it takes for a setup to come along that just makes sense.

A few months ago, I managed to identify my biggest weakness. My problem has not been that I take big losses on individual trades or that I don’t manage risk properly. My problem is that I take too many marginal trades. For days at a time I used to take 5 or 6 marginal trades which left me down a little bit every day. Over time these losing days wiped out the occasional good days, and I never got anywhere. So, I wasn’t losing a lot of money on any one day, but I was losing just enough over 3 or 4 days to wipe out my day trading gain from my good days.

It took a long time for me to realize this weakness because it’s not the problem most people seem to have. When you hear about the common day trader mistakes it’s usually to do with taking too much risk, not cutting losers or trading on tilt.

I guess what I was doing was overtrading, but I didn’t realize it because I didn’t think 6 trades a day was too many for a day trader. But, when I think about my trading style and the fact that I am looking to catch the bigger intraday trends or swings, 5 or 6 trades probably is too many.

What seemed to happen was that I would anticipate a move and then take every potential setup I could to make sure I didn’t miss that move. So, I ended up getting stopped out two, or three, or even more times, to catch a swing that often never happened anyway.

Here’s what I’m doing differently now. I start the day with no expectation of even making a trade. Even if I correctly identify a swing, or a breakout, I don’t worry about missing it. All I do is wait until I see a setup with a great risk reward profile that just seems to good to pass up. It’s almost as if I try not to trade unless it just seems wrong not to take the trade.

If I can maintain that attitude, the trades seem to come to me. I still get stopped somewhere around 25 percent of the time and I end up scratching quite a few trades, but my losses are manageable, and the winners are much bigger. The result is that I’m building up my profits slowly but consistently.

I’m averaging around a $450-day trading gain every day now, which is great, but I need to try to increase that. My next challenge is going to be scaling up my trade size and maintaining the consistency at the same time.