The Mind of a Day Trader

After I closed the $5,000 small account project down to the public...I was staring at the account up just $1500 after a month of trading it. The goal was to double the account, which was not lofty in my expectations using margin the way I do, and being that the account was only $5,000. So after one month of trying this, I just thought to myself..what went wrong? Why wasn't I able to do this? I make money pretty consistently in my main account, my green to red days ratio is around 80/20 typically - I have a small room of 10 buddies who watch me do it regularly - and yet here on this small account, my green/red day ratio was closer to 50/50. Why? What went wrong? I tried to justify it..saying "oh I didn't have buying power" or "I couldn't trade multiple names at once like I usually do" or this or that or the other thing, when in reality...it was NONE of that. It was one simple answer... pressure . On 10/20/2016, I closed this project down to the public