What went wrong and what I'm doing to get out of this hole

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On Friday, I actually hit a brick wall and froze which is a sign I hit rock bottom and compounded my losses that day. After I came too, I decided to liquidate all my positions. I also calculated my PL and looks like I back near the lows of my draw-down. To recap, around mid August, I was up around $4.6 million for the year but then my trading took a turn for the worst and in September, my accounts went from UP $4.6 million on the year to only up $3.3 million ($1.3 million draw-down). In late September and early October, I started recovering slowly and my accounts grew to up $3.7 million on the year but since then, I'm back down near the lows around $3.3 million. Although I thought I was making the necessary changes to my trading, my PL showed different. This has lead me to start analyzing myself and get it right this time around.

Here are some thoughts on what I was doing wrong...

1) My position sizing was way off. I got use to trading bigger and bigger but when I went cold, I still wasn't able to adjust and kept trying harder and harder to make it back so was sizing into all my trades instead of trading the "fun" trades small and waiting for good to great setups to size in.

2) I am very competitive and strive to be the best at anything I have a strong passion for. Because of this, I am always comparing myself to others and putting my self-worth on my trading performance rather than who I am as a person. When my trading was going good, I become over-confident and start taking more risky trades which leads to inconsistency and eventually lose money and creates this downward spiral that I'm in. By trying way to hard to recover, instead of trading getting better, it actually gets worse and causes me to be more stressed, emotional, and frustrated.

3) Instead of going back to what I'm great at, I started trying anything and everything. For example, I normally don't go long stocks and I almost never buy bounce plays. This month, I believe most of my losses came from going long instead of shorting stocks which is my core strategy.

Recap..................................
When you are in a trading slump, you should do the following....
1) Trade smaller and slowly size up as profits grow
2) Don't compare yourself to others
3) Take only the best of the best trades (must be part of your "best" strategies)
4) Liquidate all holdings and start fresh to reset
5) Analyze, study, and analyze some more on what went wrong
6) Go back to your best strategies
7) Don't try new strategies until you have fully recovered emotionally
8) Don't try harder to make the money back, instead, trade less and wait

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