Haven't I Learned Anything About Risk Management?

 It was a volatile, intensified selling week. The four majors booked 4 consecutive losing days after MLK Monday. All of them closed below their 200 SMA. QQQ and RUT  performed the worst, down 20% and 14% respectively. SPX is down 9% so far with the last Oct's breakout gap between 4386 to 4367. It's less than 1% below its current price of 4398 and likely to get filled soon. RUT broke the year-long range and closed below the 2000 mark. 

My IB account took a big hit for the week. The IB Netliq went down to 119K from last week's 137.6K. It would have been only 61K left if I didn't transfer 50K from ET to shore up the margins. The balance is at risk of margin call again. The leverage is up to 4.7, the highest since last May. I increased one SPX long put and didn't take the stop loss as planned. The realized P/L is -$48K, the largest weekly loss since last May as well.  It's likely that I will have to book more losses since there are more ITM long calls in the near term. 

The personal accounts booked a loss of -$138. It was my mistake again. I entered a 1 DTE instead of waiting for the end-of-day selling to settle. The pattern of last week has been hard-selling to make new lows at the EOD. I had to roll the threatened 4430LP to 4360 next Monday. I plan to buy long puts to defend the positions. I can use the $1500 (3x$500) long PS I earned from Friday's hedging. 

The cause of the losses is my old bad habit of poor risk management. I haven't improved much in avoiding psychological pain and taking losses. The mindset of thinking of the drawdown tolerance instead of risk management hasn't changed. Taking a 5K loss is better than rolling a 10K loss. I was simply kicking the can down the road and increasing my margin leverages. The same mistake happened over and over. I was holding and hoping for a bounce which hasn't happened. Hope is not a trading strategy. I didn't think and plan for if something happened against my hope. 

My plan for next week is to actively change my old bad habit.

1. Take stops,

2. Trading with the trends instead of passively defending my positions. 

3. Deleverag my holdings. 

4. Reversing part of my long puts to short calls if and when possible.