OK, let's see if we can finish January off!
Actually, I hate to see it go as our Trade Ideas in Parts, 1, 2 & 3 have had 51 winners and just 8 losers (87.6%) so far, not bad in a choppy market! Now it's crunch time (or crash time) as we left off at the top, on Jan 10th and it's all downhill from here for the rest of the month.
Keep in mind that timing is fairly arbitrary, of course, between the review and when the trade was made so our short trade idea on the Russell Futures at 1,160 from 1/10, made $6,000 per contract by 1/28 but is down $320 per contact as of Friday's close. Whether we specifially called a stop to that trade or not - if you rode the contract from a $6,000 gain to a $320 loss, you are an idiot. That's right - I'm not going to sugar-coat it - that is idiotic and you need to seek help!
Hopefully, this is not your case and you have reasonable expectations and set reasonable stops on your trades. My rule of thumb for Futures is, if we specifically call a stop (we usually do) then I count that total but if we make a general call, like we did on 1/10 in the main post, then I will put down the total gain on the trade with a reasonable stop (the /TF Futures went to 1,180 for an $8,000 gain before turning back up) based on our normal trading rules (see Strategy Section).
We had been playing the top of the rally "Cashy and Cautious," with means we should be CONSERVATIVELY taking pofits off the table (and that's what we switched back to this week as well).