Nothing was setting up, but you traded anyway

You were at the screen from the open. Nothing you wait for showed up. Somewhere in the middle of the day you took a position anyway, a small one, and if someone asked you now what you saw in it, the honest answer would be a sentence about the day rather than about the chart. Nothing was happening. The size is the giveaway. It was small because small is how you gave yourself permission.

Why an empty day is harder than a losing one

Waiting produces nothing you can point to. Six hours of correctly doing nothing look exactly like six hours of missing everything, and they feel worse, because a losing trade at least closes a loop while sitting flat leaves it open all day.

The terminal is open. The margin is there. The order window is two clicks away. Nobody is going to stop you. In most jobs something sits between deciding and doing. Here nothing does.

And after a few hundred sessions, being in a position is simply what a day feels like, so flat does not feel neutral. It feels like being outside. None of that is unusual and none of it says anything about you as a person. It does produce a particular kind of order, though: one that was taken because the day was long, not because anything had set up. In your own trades it reads like this.

• You cannot reconstruct afterwards what you were looking at when you entered.
• It went in in the middle of the session rather than near the open or the close.
• The quantity was smaller than your usual, which is exactly what made it feel allowed.
• The reason you would give is about the day being quiet, not about the contract you bought.
• It was a day you had already decided to sit out before you sat down.
• You closed it without much thought either, because there was never much in it.

Counting it from your own order history

Download thirty days of your trade book. It timestamps each fill rather than the moment you placed the order, which is close enough for this. Where one entry filled in several parts, count it once. Then tally entries by the hour. You will see which hours you place most of your orders in, which is something you may never have looked at.

Then two more counts. How many sessions in those thirty days did you finish completely flat, with no order placed at all? And on the days where your entry count was highest, what is the total for those days against the total for all the rest? Write down how many days are in each group alongside the total, and divide to get a per-day figure for each. Two totals over different numbers of days are not comparable; two per-day figures are.

Your trade-wise profit and loss report covers whatever date range you ask for, so you can total the rows for each day yourself. Use that report rather than the ledger, because ledger entries include charges and margin movements and are dated by settlement rather than by the day you traded.