I have always resisted creating a journal because I didn't feel my approach to trading is common or accepted by most. I have recently (3 years ago) entered the world of trading. Not much compared to many on this site. Now considering 2+ years of that time was not focused on learning about price action and the market but rather investigating Automated Strategies.
Makes sense right, jump into stock trading and rather than take the time to understand this new world, immediately try to automate what I already don't understand. I considered myself a smart guy and a good coder so it should be easy. I did spend a lot of time on futures.io (formerly BMT) to understand indicators and then kept applying all the new indicators and combinations of those indicators in strategies to get a winning system.
I would then back test them and WOW, I was rich. The back-tests showed incredible profits, one was over $1Mil in a few months. Then I decided to add the commissions into the calculation... Not so good, I couldn't afford the $1.3Mil or so to make the $1Mil. I am sure my broker would have been in heaven, and I would fall like many others down this path of the Holy Grail. I certainly tried live trading at times, did really good for a while, then got distracted at work and tried to trade, and I paid for a major education of what not to do while trading. It takes time and effort to do it right manually.
I we certain from seeing the success from manual discretionary trading, automation was the only way to hold a job and trade at the same time. Certainly once I made my fortune, I would be able to quit my job and "auto-trade" full time. Well, this will my my journal of my path to finding my Holy Grail.
I will go back in time to start and share my thoughts and results (as best I can recall and reproduce) and where it has lead me over time. Hopefully through this process, you can join me on my quest and maybe complete your own at the same time. You may also see errors in my path that you can avoid, shortening your quest.
I am not sure how often I will post, but I know at times, I may post things that make better sense to myself and what I am doing at that moment and need to remember. I will try my best to clue you in as to the importance (good/bad) of the thought. I have tried to include these thoughts in more of "technology" threads which I don't feel are a good place and may not reach others that may be interested but don't want the deep stuff...