Market update 5-4: failure to have a stop loss

Today the markets rallied over 3 percent. This rally since march has
been powerful. This comes at a very bad time when I was short the
market. I shorted the market expecting that this rally has been
overextended and I anticipated a potential pullback. It did pull back
but the pullback was small.

I have been building my gains for months with small gains, but given
the option strategies I employed mostly credit spreads and my foray
into more speculative puts on the iwm have mostly wiped out months of
gain. This is reminiscent of last year during the extremely violent
moves downward during the financial turmoil in September and November
of many sigma moves for many consecutive days.

I started this journal to keep track of my trades, but also as a means
of developing more discipline with my risk management of trades. It's
extremely easy to put on a trade, but the skill is in managing the
trade when the trade goes against you.

I have made some strides in putting stop losses but most of the stops
have been mental. Since I don't have the discipline I need to put the
actual stops when I initiate the trade, otherwise if I continue to
trade without a stop loss I will never become profitable trading.