This is my first public trading journal and my first post in this forum overall. It is a big step for me. I have been doing notes on my trading and recently decided to make it public and hopefully receive feedback that will improve my trading. I am looking to share my journey with everybody in this fantastic community of traders and hopefully many of you find it useful as well.
A little about me: I am from Bulgaria and currently live in Singapore. I work as a management consultant (very long hours) and recently I discovered I have a passion for trading and I find it extremely interesting. Even if I work over 14 hours a day, I go home and continue for another 2-3 hours trading the AM session in US. I am a beginner in trading and I have been educating myself and trading in SIM for about 6 months now.
To make it clear, I have answered some of the basic questions that you might be asking for my goals, strategy, markets, etc.
What are my personal goals with trading?
Due to some health and family matters I cannot any longer work long hours with my job and I will need to quit or find a way to work part time. Trading will give me the flexibility to work from home and the hours I want
Learn more about myself
What are my trading goals?
Be consistently profitable
Learn trading discipline
Financial freedom
Build capital to do other investments
What are my goals with this journal?
Document every trading day with my trades and results
Hold myself accountable to follow my strategy
Focus on mental challenges during trading (biggest part to overcome in my opinion)
Get feedback from other traders and improve as I go forward
Give back to the trading community
Which market will I be trading? ES e-mini S&P futures
Which platform and data providers will I be using? Ninja Trader 7 with Continuum
How did I learn about trading and what is my source to build my strategy? I have used the PATs price action manual and I have been following Mack's youtube channel
What are my chart settings? Chart is set at 2000 ticks, 24h view
What indicators will I be using? I will only use the EMA 21, Tick count and a custom Newsfeed indicator
What is my strategy? (high level version)
Range day: Sell the highs, buy the lows. Avoid trading in the middle (depends on how wide the range is). Follow trends inside the trend if too wide
Trend days: buy/sell pullbacks to the EMA
How do I enter a trade?
Enter only on key entry points after a bar has closed in your direction. Put a Stop buy/Sell order one tick below/above the signal bar. I have also a stop loss order 1-2 ticks below/above my signal bar and never exceeding 8 ticks.
How do I take profit?
I use automated strategy with NT and take a portion of my trade after the first 4 ticks and leave the rest of my order as a runner. I exit the runner based on a measured leg or reverse signal in the price action.
What is the size of my SIM account (desired live account) and how many contract do I trade? I have a 10k SIM account and I trade with 3 contracts (2 contracts as a scalp and 1 contract as a runner)
What is my daily profit target? 400 USD a day
What is my max daily loss? 300 usd
What is my target for daily trades? - 3-5 trades max
What is my targeted timeline on SIM and starting live? My goal is to trade on SIM until I double the SIM account (20k) and be consistently profitable for at least 3 months in a row. After those 2 big milestones are achieved I will feel comfortable to trade my own capital
What are some of the books that I have read to help me with my trading? - Al Brooks - Reading price chart bar by bar; Mark Douglas - Trading in the Zone, Thinking fast and slow -
Daniel Kahneman
What have been my results before this on SIM for the past few months? My first month on SIM I was making big losses and traded very randomly. I took me quite a bit of time to put structure on how I trade and I have been following my plan for the past 1 month and 1/2 successfully. I started with a 5k SIM account …