The Dog or the Hydrant?

Monday, I was definitely the hydrant.

A quick recap of events starting Sunday evening:
5:00pm - Start Volleyball practice
6:00pm - Team struggles to finish a drill due to lack of focus
6:30pm - Team is starting to frustrate me
6:35pm - Team starts running horses
6:50pm - Best player arguably on team goes down with a knee injury. Could be lost for the year. We travel to Atlanta to play in very important tournament this weekend. Bad!
7:30pm - Arrive back home. Wife leaves to go watch Grey's Anatomy over at friend's house.
8:00pm - Start to read book "Mechanical Trading Systems" (very good book by the way)
10:00pm - Become very tired and fall asleep
11:50pm - Hear phone beep. Message from wife. She will be home later. Bad!
12:30am - Decide to read again because I can't fall back asleep.
1:30am - Fall asleep
1:50am - Wife returns home and wakes me up.
2:30am - Get up to watch TV because can't fall asleep.
3:00am - Get on computer to read about the market. Take a Tylenol PM to knock me out.
3:30am - Still not tired. But upset and depressed I can't fall asleep
3:45am - Go to Gold's Gym and run on eliptical machine for 45 minutes
4:45am - return home still not tired (even from the Tylenol PM)
5:00am - wake wife up and make her talk to me for the next hour and a half
6:30am - Get ready for work
7:15am - Leave for work and just now starting to feel the effects from the Tylenol PM.
8:00am - Get to work and want to lay down and go to sleep. I force myself to stay awake and at least try to trade for the morning.
9:30am - Markets have been open for an hour and I have zero winning trades. I am down $75. I want to go back home and sleep, but hang around for lunch. It's Jason's Deli.
11:30am - Eat lunch
12:30pm - Leave for the day after making two more non-winning trades. Down a total of $90.
1:15pm - Come home and go to sleep

I don't know what it was about not being able to fall asleep, but it sucked! I know I was concerned about the girl on the volleyball team. I was hoping she was OK. I was excited about work, but something else was keeping me up. I have no idea what it was, but it had to have been something in my sub-conscience. Anyway, I felt like the "hydrant" all day long and couldn't wait to come home and actually sleep.

Needless to say, I got plenty of sleep last night, and had a good day of trading today. I traded nearly 5000 shares and was only down $20. I would have been up had I not been stupid and tried to make some trades after the FOMC announcement this afternoon. Stupid. I got killed. Was up $40 before that.

Good news. My trigger was finally built, so tomorrow I will see just how good my observations are. This trigger will point out stocks that fit my technical criteria for trading. I think this will either help me tremendously or send me back to the drawing boards. I will let you know tomorrow.