I'm long past euphoria of trading and getting rich fast. As a matter of fact, I've been in equity investing for a long 7 years but as we all know, last few years haven't been exactly prosperous for buy&hold strategies. I'm relative new to trading (little bit more than a year with some breaks due to learning for CFA and other things) but in that short period I've spent really a lot of time studying the charts and developing various strategies. Now I want to give trading my undivided attention for at least two years before I give up. I'm not in a hurry and want to build great foundation to my trading.
The primary goal of this journal is to improve my trading and deal with some trading psychology problems I would like to solve. Currently I'm trading on the demo account, and this journal should be helping me with transition to profitable live account trading. While the first step in my live trading will be trading Oil ETFs (specifically USO), I will post screenshots of trades made on CL futures because I'm used to that charts.
My trading plan is to trade on demo account for full 2 months at least and then start really slow with 150-200 USO shares. (1 CL contract is same as 2500 USO).
That way, I'll be risking around 20$ per trade, and that should keep my account alive for a very long time.
I realize that many traders don't take demo trading seriosly, but putting all this trades here should make me more serious about demo trading. By now I had periods when I did take demo trading really seriously and times when I fooled around with demo account.
I do have countless hours of experience watching CL and trading it on the demo account, but I have common traders' problem of not being able to transfer great trading results from demo to live trading. I started trading CL live (2 car, first profit target 15t), but very soon realized that it is way too much risk for my account of 23k $. So thats the reason I decided to start trading USO. In about two months I should put another 8k $ in my account as I became fully aware of problems arising when undercapitalized and why is that so many succesful traders mention that. That means I will have 31k$ which is 6k above pattern daytrader minimum account balance. Essentially, based on my new perception of risk it means that I have 6k to risk. With a rate of risking 20$ per trade, I can make 300 wrong trades before I get out of the game. I don't think that should happen. But I learned the hard way that everything is possible in trading, so thats the reason for my extreme conservatism.
I'm very determined in making these baby steps which should lead me to a greater confidence, greater skill in trading and eventually steady and consistent rise in equity.
My goal in trading is to get these big daily moves of 50-100 ticks and I'm not interested in scalping.
Tools I use are price action, pivots and SMA10 on 1000 or 2000 volume charts.
All in all, ultimate goal is CONSISTENCY. I will tell that to myself really often in this thread.