For some unfathomable reason, the economic calendar sometimes gives me the wrong times. I sometimes get the wrong number of hours versus UTC.

As I also need to keep the difference with the US in mind and not every release happens at the same time, and daylight savings time doesn’t run synchronously either and I am in two different timezone countries, certainly in my head, I don’t always notice it when this happens.

Today, it happened again, apparently, or maybe this time it was me who got the time wrong. (Probably! Mea culpa.) (Update: Nope, a day or so later I once again noticed that the time of the calendar was off again. After I left Portsmouth, I would still often remain on UK time. When I contacted someone about this, the time started changing 1 hour in the other direction (for Letland).

Today’s data releases (Jolts etc) tripped me up.

It cost me about 7 bucks. Could be worse.

(Ehm, did it? Not necessarily. I closed a short at a loss of 7, but had intended to. It was a trade that I was unable to close yesterday when I wanted to, a pending trade that I should have deleted before it kicked in. I have a long running that I would have closed today, if I had been appropriately alert, but that’s actually all right for now. The day ain’t over yet, anyway.)

I found myself thinking “what’s that rate waiting for, why’s it hovering, stalling? The data aren’t coming in yet, after all.”

Focus…

What can I say? I’m human. My back is troubling me. It’s distracting. I’m focusing on ibuprofen. My circumstances are crappy, too. I do what I can. I’m still ahead. Mistakes are part of it.

I also currently sometimes lose the connection to the server at vital times. I want to open or close a trade and suddenly find that I can’t. It’s happened twice now in two days and it’s unusual. Been updating and tweaking stuff today for that reason. (Update: Likely related to VNP.)

Also, I made a mistake this morning – the long – that I would have been unable to make, had I been at my computer instead of on a phone. So I later set out to do something about this if I could. (I succeeded, but trading on a phone or tablet remains crappy relative to trading with several large screens.) The mistakes that I make aren’t fatal but they make the going so slow. I need a proper den! And no distractions – that is, of a certain kind – but that goes without saying.

But my tablet, which had become agonisingly slow, so slow that I stopped using it, spontaneously rebooted itself this afternoon – just like my main phone, ten days or so ago – and now seems functional again. Hopefully, that’s permanent.

So things aren’t that bad. Except my back right now. (That’s pretty damn tricky to manoeuvre right now. I do my best. It will be okay, but I need to make some adjustments. Life needs to move a step up for me now. Has to.)

(Also, I think that maybe I’m now finally starting to get a handle on the stalking nonsense. Hard to say with absolute certainty.)