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I am a man of few words. Basically by character, also becos lack of English language skills and geeky market talk and terms I dont know the meaning of.
I have visual and rational approach by nature, which I think may help with day trading and chart gazing.
Before even TOUCHING a simulated trading account, I read on zillion trading forums to study and learn from the profs about blowing up accounts, and about greed and fear, so eventually since starting out on sim, I take this very careful approach, until I make stable little profits over an extended period of time.
Keys:
Day trading
S&P Emini
1 future, SIM account
1 trade a day keeps doctor away. however, greed makes doctor come in often Interactive Brokers
Siera Chart
Bracket Trader Ichimoku Kinko Hyo, 5m Heikin Ashi scheme
Some people believe the Bible, some people do not. Some people accept Jesus Christ as the Saviour, some people do not.
Trading has similarities in that what traders believe and use on their charts can differ greatly, and what Christians believe and what Bible they use can differ. Although, with biblical Christianity there is ONLY one way to get to heaven, in trading there are various ways to become profitable.
In my journey to salvation, I learned a lot of what I previously believed was false and had been told a lot of lies, I also learned a lot about myself.
I find this the same in my journey to becoming a trader. There are a lot of lies being told. More importantly, I thought I was patient, I thought I was disciplined, I thought I had great control over my emotions. Was I ever wrong.
The next step on my trading journey is to start a journal here, that I may with your help, learn more about myself, and have the blinders taken off my eyes to see and trade what is already in front of me.
Hi Ward
happy you are here , I am on same Journey . I have discovered a lot about myself and salvation since Trading i un covered many lies myself . I am Free
Curtis
I am what I consider a beginner in the trading world, as I am up to this point still lost to success. I started investing late in life and as such have been attempting to play catch up since I started investing around 12 years ago. Up to now I have been in stocks, dabbled in options and had a practice acct. in forex. A few years ago I found myself confined to my home for 3 months while I recuperated from surgery from a blown out shoulder injury and discovered a fantastic way to pass the time---daytrading. It scared the crap out of me while at the same time set the light bulbs off above my head. I found it exhilarating, satisfying, I found it to be like nothing else I have ever experienced in my lifetime. When it was time to return to my regular everyday job I was saddened.
At this point I have read numerous books on swingtrading, daytrading, technical analysis, done hundreds if not thousands of internet searches on investing and trading, yet I still have not figured it out completely. For this reason I reach out to those of you who have made a successful life of working for yourselves in a life of trading, so that I may learn from you and hopefully someday help those around me to improve their lot in life, as we all aspire for ourselves and our families.
What led me here was an internet search on a vendor I was researching for any information on and I found this site to be the most helpful in that search, so I plant myself here with the hope that I may gain even more knowledge with the help of active traders. I am really interested now in learning Forex and e-mini futures trading with the hopes of adding to my income in my spare time at night.
Thanks to you Big Mike for providing this forum and I look forward to interacting with and learning from all the other traders that frequent this site.
I'm new here. I have been trading for awhile but feel inexperienced and would like to learn from folks who are actually trading. I have been trading options, just buying puts and calls. I trade from an IRA but was wondering about the tax ramifications of a non-IRA account and all the "Trader Status" stuff.
· I don't know about heaven and such but I do know how important it is to have 'faith' - faith in myself - faith in myself to learn and faith that I will know when I have learned enough to proceed. I never forget though that I have to keep learning.
· I may or may not have been lucky to know from the beginning that I am not generally disciplined, focused, patient or able to control my emotions. I am still working on determining how to trade with what I am and also have embarked on a long term journey to help me change - slowly but surely.
· I am also working on learning how to see what is 'in front of me'. It is now a common saying that I should trade the market as it is not as I want it to be. This seems very wise but translating that wisdom into practice is still my challenge. Here's my thoughts on seeing what is in front of me.
o There is only one thing I can see and that is the past. I can see the most recent trade or I can see as many trades as I want going back almost as far as I want.
o For any given trade I can only see:
§ the price it traded at
§ the time it traded at
§ the volume traded
§ whether it traded at the bid or the offer.
o For any given trade I cannot even be sure that I saw the 'complete' trade. For example if I want to buy 10 contracts this might result in one trade of 10 or 10 trades of one.
o The other thing that I can see is the order book and how many contracts are offered or bid at any given time. Even this information is misleading because of spoofing and icebergs.
o This covers my ability to see what is in front of me. From here I have to start interpreting what I can see of the past. It is this act and art of interpreting that is the real challenge. Examples:
§ Highs / lows. These are facts but only when interpreted within a time frame. A high of day is likely to be different than a high of the week or high of the last hour.
§ Volume. I can see the fact of how many contracts traded but those have to be interpreted within time frames as above or refined even more specific to an 'event' such as the volume that traded at the high of day.
§ Speed. I can see the fact of how fast orders were executing similar to volume.
§ Trades at bid or offer. Once again interpreted within context of time or events.
o Above I have listed the 'simple' interpretations. From here interpretations become increasingly complex and arbitrary. For example moving averages and trend lines are of 'average' complexity but even these are open to all sorts of contextual interpretation. Even more complex interpretations such as Bollinger Bands increase the challenge.
This means that I cannot trade what I see in front of me. "It" is always behind me whether that is a microsecond or 5 years. I have to give "it" some context, some interpretation.
There are no 'wrong' interpretations. It is just that some work better than others for some people for some time.
I am working on finding the interpretation that works for me; the interpretation I can believe in while at the same time recognizing that any interpretation has a finite life and will have to be replaced.
Also at the same time I have to trade in a manner that is compatible with my personality and behavior. The end goal is to always pull the trigger to get in a trade when it meets the criteria of my interpretation and then holding my winners and dumping my losers according to my interpretation of what is unfolding.
That's sounds like a fair twist of faith towards trading to me, I thought that the thread was going a bit odd lately, I never seen posting faith/religion on trading forums. But then again, I am a rookie.
First let me say thanks for putting together this site and that I'm excited to be a part of a vibrant community. I'm not sure how much I can add to the conversation but I look forward to helping in anyway I can.
I have been interested in stocks and options for the past 10 years and have had some rather wild swings in accounts. I started trading options in high school with $1000 and whittled it down to $650 until I got to college. While in college I worked a few jobs and continually added to my account blaming my losses on transaction costs vs. an actual gap in my trading ability. After graduating college with an engineering degree I realized that I wanted to freedom to work on my own and have always dreamed of being able to beat the market.
Immediately after school, I worked for 3 years as a consultant until I saved about 100k and decided I would take some time off to start investing on my own and see if I could make a go of trading for a living. After about 3 months I was down 24k and extremely disappointed in myself for the consistent stupid psychological mistakes I was making and decided to give up on trading. Instead I would focus my efforts on another passion of mine building a business because I was under the belief that the market could no longer be beaten.
After building up a business with my family, I had a chance meeting with someone who has had extremely good success building automated trading strategies. Over the past 10 years he has averaged about 200% return per year and is now one of the largest 400 traders (by trading size) by SEC standards. After obvious proof that it is very possible to beat the market I am now challenging myself once again to make a go of the stock market.
After all of what I have gone through I know my largest reason for failure was twofold, first I had no risk management methodology and the massive swings in my trading account were causing me to tear my hair out. The psychological effects from this were to avoid trading unless it was a sure thing...obviously that didn't work. Secondly I was relying on other peoples research to give me trading ideas, and i was not verifying the result using historical testing. This caused me to not know how to improve the strategies or even come up with new ones when they didn't work.
I have read almost everybook that I could on trading, psychology, fundamental investing, and the biographies of those who were successful and overtime have realized why I have not been the same success. Each of those investors/traders understood their risk profile, trading in line with their fundamental beliefs of how to beat the market and backed it up with some form of data.
After many stumbles I have come to the belief that an automated trading system makes the most sense for me because the development of a system will help me to eliminate the key reasons for failures (money management and historical testing). I am looking to prove to myself that I can be a success, which I define as 20%+ return/year with minimal drawdowns (10% or less) and look forward to helping others achieve the same thing.
