Lesson Learned: Not respecting the daily close on $SPX

Over the years, I've made plenty of mistakes, but one that sticks out from last year was not properly weighting the daily close on $SPX. I had a short position coming into a specific day, felt pretty good about the intra-day action, and managed to add some size near what I thought was a decent resistance. Price then chopped around, and the daily close ended up being above a key level I'd marked for a stop, but I told myself it was noise, probably just end-of-day shenanigans. I didn't honor my own rule. Sure enough, the next morning, we gapped up significantly, blew through my original stop and my mental stop, and I ended up taking a much larger loss than necessary. It's a simple lesson, really: if your criteria for exit is met, take the exit. Don't rationalize. The market doesn't care about your feelings or your 'almost.' Disciplined exits save capital to fight another day.