When I opened the chart, the market once again had that messy early structure — big up, big down, big confusion. The bulls pushed up strongly to the top of the range with good follow-through, and we even got a HL BOPB outside the top of the range. But the breakout wasn’t convincing. It looked more like an FBO, and on top of that, I was buying right into last week’s high.

On the H1 chart I saw a huge top-gun signal bar, so I assumed the bulls were stronger than they actually were. That was the mistake. I took off my single contract at the EMA for a -12 point loss. I didn’t want to ride the whole move all the way back to the range low, even though my original plan was to possibly scale in on a pullback.

Right after I exited, the market took a clean nose dive and even broke the range low. It eventually stalled at the 1H 20 EMA, then went sideways at the range low before drifting back into the range.

The range turned out to be bigger than I initially thought. After another retest of the highs, prices fell again and stalled at the range low. After two attempts to break lower, we got a HL MTR right at the range low, sitting on the 1H 20 EMA. So I entered long with 2 contracts — one targeting +5 pts, and the second set for a bigger run.

I had TP2 placed at 12.75 for a clean 2R. I’m trying to hold trades longer, and this was the perfect candidate. But I made the classic mistake: I moved my stop to BE. We got a strong pullback, and I got scared. That 50% pullback tagged my stop by a tick, then the market immediately reversed back up. Not only would it have hit my TP — it ended up running all the way to the top of the range, easily giving 20 pts.