Today was one of the most frustrating days of the year. After reading Mark Douglas' book, Trading in the Zone, I realized I had a lot of work to do with the mental aspect of trading. I wrote down several of his suggestions and have been following them religiously for about a month now. One of them is to repeat : I am a consitently, successful trader. I say this twice before I go to bed and twice when I wake up in the morning. The key is to get into your subconscious and make your brain automatically believe this. A lot like autosuggestion. The idea is that your thoughts are things and you will attract this to you, i.e. the law of attraction. Well, today was extremely frustrating. RTP broke out and gapped up this morning. I looked at the chart last night and calculated the buy point to be $518.01. The stock opened in the $530's. I kept watching as it moved from 535 to 537 to 540. Finally I told myself that I had better buy here before it goes up any further. The stock was up about 4% at the time and I remember Jesse Livermore saying that you want to buy within 5% of the breakout to avoid getting caught in a correction. I placed a buy order at $539.15. This turned out to be right at the high. Just my luck. Right after I bought, the stock goes down and closes at $525. Very Frustrating! I do all this research and mental work only to see the stock go down. The market is not for the weak or faint of heart. I am determined to be a success and will ultimately profit from trading stocks. Its just times like these that are frustrating.