As I've explained to many of my east coast friends on a regular basis, doing any kind of trading from the west coast tends to be a bit different. The market opens at 6:30am, to say nothing of the pre-market. At 1pm you're done, and even if you stay for the after hours session, you're finished by 3:00. You have to either be an insomniac or do things in a fairly structured way in order to make it work.

For me it means doing all my "homework" the night before. I can read the Journal, FT and IBD online before bed. I have info from Asia after dinner and depending on when I get to bed I might also be able to check out the early European markets. I get to sleep on it and in the morning all I need to catch up on is the past six hours, mostly it's a "negative" process. I'm basically trying to quickly figure out if anything has changed since going to bed. I only re-evaluate things if something important has changed.

Being in class all day for a week has meant even less time to dedicate to anything market-related. Yet I've made money every single day, and actually have had one of my best recent weeks. Even today's downturn was an up day for me, albeit a small one.

The lesson I'm drawing from all this is that I have most certainly been overthinking things and probably overtrading recently.

A good lesson to remember when I get home.

-BTC