I'm a new underfunded trader trying to find my edge. I Started back in February after my good friend started trading as his day job. He is day trading stocks and I thought that seemed really cool so I put some funds into a TD Ameritrade account to try to make some money on the side. It seemed like a better idea than letting it sit in my savings making a few dollars a year. First week in I made almost 20% trading Tesla stock but I wanted to play more... however I did not have the funding to get past the pattern day trading restrictions.
After many many hours on youtube and surfing the interwebs I decided to give scalping the ES a shot. I started absorbing any freely available knowledge price action related. Then I signed up for some online courses and purchased Macks PATS manual and Ninjatrader. I had some success. Then some failures.... then a lot more failures. I had become a donator. I got frustrated with Mack's videos where he points out all of the great 2nd entries but rarely states the trades he actually takes. Although watching him scalp 25 contracts on his few live trading videos is quite something. I started watching and reading Al Brooks and the more I learned the more I failed. I can sim trade myself into thousand dollar days with single ES contracts almost daily but the first trade with my real money account almost always fails.
There is a psychological barrier that I am working on but in the mean time I have tried to learn coding to take myself out of the equation. Hundreds of hours of backtesting failed ideas is grueling and then when you change something you have to go back and do it again. I look for very specific confluences for my trades and if I am supposed to trade like a robot then why not have a robot trade for me. Coding within Ninjascript is tricky for a new coder. I can rarely get the code to do exactly what I want or trade exactly where I would myself. So I am looking for tools and training and now I see that Shark Indicators is giving trial licenses out for those who create journals.
What do I want out of this journal? Well I want to become a profitable trader. I live in a world where $200 a day means that I don't have to work for the man. $300 a day is a better life. I don't need thousands of dollars a day but if that could happen then I'll be updating my journal from some tropical island somewhere. I want to develop my "edge" and hone it until it is sharp and if that edge can be automated so that I can develop more "edges". I find that talking through my trades and ideas helps me understand them better myself and if that's all I get from this journal then it will still be very worth it.