Dear All,

The name is Robin and I joined the forum a week ago. I am now 36 years old and i started trading long ago when I was 22 years old.

Being an absolute idiot, the plan was to listen to the broker.... things went OK during the last breaths of the bull market which quickly came to an end off course. Lost about half the 25000 Euro trading account which was given to me by my parents....

After this rather serious beating I at least learned there was a little bit more to it then just listening to brokers. After a 3 month break ,I started to follow courses in Technical analysis and with the new knowledge, I traded my way back to break even + a little during the ensuing bear market.

I then decided that trading was for me, neglected my education (mistake #2) and in the subsequent sideways market I slowly lost a portion of my capital until I made a mistake in an option expiration that ruined the best trade of the year.... Could not believe I made a mistake like that and stopped trading since I felt quite depressed. left the markets when I was 25 and not thinking of returning...

2 years down the line and with some money I had made, I decided to trade futures again on the Dutch stock exchange and I traded for a living for 3 months using the latest metastock RT version. The results were mixed and I found that trading was a bit of a lonely exercise and I decided to quit to find a regular job, side tracking my trading career for a second time.

Entered again the trading arena 3 year later using Trade station and a trading system I had bought to day trade the ES mini in the evening hours. I though the automation would better help me make the trades without thinking too much. Unfortunately I was wrong and I found out that I kept overriding the system when I was around... Again the results were mixed and I decided to turn off the machine 4 months down the line....

Since 3 months, I am once again on the lengthy an interesting journey trying to jump over my shadow and trying to break boundaries. In all those years, I have felt that I was 'too smart to die' and 'too stupid to live' when it comes to trading in the markets, being kind of a break even trader minus commissions :-)

I have started to use Ninja Trader in Sim mode now and I am amazed by the power of the programming interface and things you can do with it. In am not a programmer by background but I learned VBA for Excel about 8 years ago and I have progressed slowly with the C# programming language.

Main focus for me is to devise a rule based approach using ninja trader in sim mode to test ideas and to try and break my bad trading habits... again :-) I joined the forum to not be too lonely in this endeavor which it can be at times. Hope to share some of my experiences with others where I can and no doubt I will get plenty in return.

Greetz and happy trading,
leduc

Welcome to all new members!

If you are here to improve your trading, let me tell you that the best way to do that is by actively participating in the forum. Reply to posts, help others, ask questions. Just speak from your own experience, even if that experience is short. The more you participate, the more you will learn, and the better trader you will become.

Mike

Good thread. I opened my first trading account in September 2008, holed up in the basement of a 1970's area ski chalet in BC... a couple of friendly deer mice keeping me company and driving me crazy, ahh, and as the snow silently fell and I listened to the debates on capitol hill with my little satellite radio, I really thought I was about to blow it wide open!!

Haha, oh lord, account number one, what was it, 300 points slippage on ES as IB froze my laptop during some comment made by a senator about GM, and it was the big contracts, fully leveraged baby! I remember the feeling now as I recollect how that month ended in ashes, it gives me chills.

Well, it has been almost 24 months now. For the past 16 I have been going 24/7, and I mean that literally, I haven't take a single day or even an hour from this computer in that time, save a few statutory holidays.

It doesn't matter what you think you know, because you don't know what the market is until you are in it for a good period of time, and then there is the challenge of 'you'. This will make sense as you learn what the market really is.

Best advice, get a mentor, I did not, start small small small, I went big. Don't expect to make a penny in your first year or two, I am bankrupt. Try not to lose very much. And be prepared to work like you have never worked before. I consider myself a fairly good study. I have two degrees, an MBA from a top US school with a Hong Kong campus, cum laude in my undergraduate from a high caliber school, but let me tell you, I've never worked this hard and continuously at anything in my life.

The irony as Mike points out is that as you get closer to becoming your dream it may start to appear as though it really is simple. So perhaps the simpler a thing is the harder it becomes to understand. Well Good Luck, try not to let your body get too damaged from the work you are about to do if you want to reach the dream... Now I'm about to kick this into gear now and I will be back to this post in a few months and say wow, what a long long two years it took to get here.

Moderator Notice Post was moved from Live Trading Room thread to here. -- Big Mike

Kickerr and others that may be thinking of spending money on training.

May I suggest that you not go to the course and spend your time here at BigMikeTrading. You'll get better, more relevant information here than you will spending $5000 to get training from someone who most likely doesn't trade themselves.

Mike Winfrey

I started on the opposite end where nothing happens in a day, namely Corporate Finance, or as we used to call it, Underwriting. Being cursed with an OR degree and a Canadian business degree, I ended up being transferred to four continents to design sales and trading systems. Despite expert knowledge, when I started trading for myself I still blew myself up several times. I had to learn the basics of humility and discipline.

My focus now is the short-term; it is a necessity because nobody invest any more in America. Also, my wife and son want to eat. I look forward to exchanging information and learning from you all.

Have you by chance run across eminitradingschool.com or got any comments?

Most of the guys I went to Ivey with are doing ok and last I checked investment flows are heading into USA. Well, I guess I'm lucky, no wifey and children to feed. There is a 99% chance of starving to death while learning how to trade, and it takes a long time and all of your time, so you really have to ask yourself honestly are you in a position to do that? The marketing crap from everybody trying to sell you something is just designed to make you think unrealistically and to extract your money. Hard questions. I'm in rags, I don't recommend it to people who are not comfortable in such a literal state of affairs...

Hi everyone,

I was attracted to your site by discussion on AMP Trading/NinjaTrader/Zen-Fire combination. I've been AMP's happy, if not exactly profitable, customer for about 5 years. It wasn't their fault though.

Happy trading,

Vlad.

G'Day Steve,

I have done a number of online courses and trading rooms over 3 years. I think a good one can give you a head start for sure, but there are some really crappy ones out there also.

However to be honest, I think 4 months is an unrealistic period to become profitable. Very few traders would become consistant after 4 months.

Once you have some ideas of how the market works, how it moves from one area to another, S/R etc, then you just need chart time, and probably years, the more you watch those charts, the more you get the market into you and then one day you realize that you can trade ! I when I say watch the chart, I mean not just reviewing them, but watching them get drawn.

I'm not sure why the course you are looking at would give students $25,000 to trade, surely they would have better returns if they traded it themselves ? I'de look into it carefully ... if its too good to be true ............

Good luck.

Steve

I tend to support the JoeBlow's view on courses. I'm not familiar with these guys but I know a little bit about Market Profile they seem to live by. A few years back I bought a Market Profile course by CSI and spent over a year learning everything there is to know about it. Needless to say I found it absolutely useless as a practical method of trading. IMO it's just a little peg in the vast universe of trading tools. You can get a very good idea about the method from a free MP course by CBOT and from a few books on the subject by Steidlmayer (the founding father), Moynihan, and Jones.