I'm going to be posting monthly results on her also to trade my overall performance and as an easier way to see how I do in between months instead of looking at all my daily data.

10 Days traded
11 Trades 8 Wins 2 Losses and 1 Break even
Win Percentage 81.82%
Avg Win 98.61$
Commission as a % of profit 11.36%
Total Net Points 14.75
662.26$ profit at a 5.52% return on investment


I also have attached my equity curve from the beginning of the month.

I forgot to add my personal progress over the month. Over all I am very happy with the progress I made, my discipline improve very very fast with only 1 slip up over the time. I have almost fully eliminated my emotions when placing a trade. The only thing I would really like to work on in the next month is working on getting in multiple trades in a day. So far I have pretty much only been taking 1 trade per day but I know if I want to grow my account faster I will need to start taking all trades from 9:30 to noon like my trading plan says. I just am working on getting over the fact that I could give back the money I had just made potentially just minutes before the second trade comes up. But overall I am very happy and my 3 month goal was to be down no more than 1200$ so I think I am doing good even though I know a lot could change in little time.

Rough day on the market today! Missed a fill on the first trade of the morning but 1 tic which would have gone to my target but no sweat I waited for the second trade. Got in this but had the market reverse right as I moved my stop to break even. Thankfully I got out then because if I hadnt moved it to break even I would have lost money on it! So I made a whole .04% today! I think I will probably be done trading it doesnt look like a good market for me to be trading my system in but I will continue to watch it for a little while.

Took the first trade of the morning and pulled another 2.5 points out of the market. This is getting me closer to my goals stated in the previous posts of hitting 10% and 15% to move on the my next steps of the process. This concludes the third full week of trade besides missing 2 Fridays. (13 days traded) I am now up 7.43%!

Today I also went out to Staples and gathered some new things for my office. I am going to start printing out my daily futures statements and keeping them in a binder along with the monthly statements to make taxes easier. I will also be keeping track of any expenses related to trading to use as a write off.

I don't like the set ups on the market this morning so I am going to just stop trading before I get my self way down on the day. Took a 75$ loss right in the open. The trade had initially been 75$ in my favor, 1 tic away from me moving to break even(87.50) when it reversed to go to where I had thought it would have been going after 10 and not right off at the open. Just another day in the business. Even with this style of trade I still remanded very emotionless which was excellent!


Today since I am now a full time trader (9-noon) I am going to look at other futures markets and do basic back testing on them to see which other ones look good to pick trades up on when i get going with some more capitol. Also a little back testing on /es to see if I can pick up on the morning direction better.

Update within an update. Just spent the last 2 hours and just picked up the art of Auction Market Theory and using that to determine Support and Resistance levels and so far looking at it it will be a huge help to put this in tandem with my entry strategy! I have already been able to call the market direction just knowing how to use it for about an hour. Lunch time now but I will continue to advance my knowledge on in through out to week so I can fully ad this to my strategy hopefully as soon as next week to help me determine more precise exits on my trades!

Well I took 112.50 out of the market today right after 10 hit. I went long and was planing on holding this one for a while because I knew it had a huge gap to fill from the yesterday and the nights run. I was quickly up 87.50 which is where I bring it to break even so its basically a free trade at that point, and a win is a win. at this point I set my target at 4 points from my entry to see it come right down to test where I had set my stop. Luckily it didn't hit it. after that I felt like i may have made an error when looking at the data so I moved my profit to 112.50 which it quickly hit. I was very nervous in this trade for the first time since I started trading on the 15th of September. The market did end up going to my 4 pt target but I made money so I am happy! Up 7.63% now and over 900$.


But then to my emotional side of this trade. Yesterday I had a meeting with my boss and he said if I wanted to keep having the morning off to trade that I would need to take a cut in salary. I thought about this for a while and looked back at the 1800 Hours of research and back testing I have put in since August of 2013 and decided I was comfortable enough with my back testing, paper trading and now a small sample size of live trading results to go pursuit this to its fullest. I will be loosing over 150$ a week in straight pay along with some other small benefits but once I hit my 15% target to go all in with my plan I feel comfortable that I can compensate for that and then some for the slight decrease. I know most people probably wouldn't go for this with such a small sample size of live data but where I am only 22 I feel like if I cant make it through the winter with this method I wont be ruining the rest of my life with this one decision. If it happens to go my way then that's great if not I can pick the full time job up in April of 2014 if I so choose that route.

I just wanna say thanks to everyone that views this trading journal regularly. It really keeps me in line to make sure I am not leaving out anything and am following my trading plans as close as I can! I will be back tomorrow with another update!


While I keep working till noon today I plan on watching the market to just learn a little more on its movement. Screen time wont hurt at this point. I will also be going back over my business plan just to revise it as needed based on my time in the live markets to see if any of my goals are unrealistic or if I feel like they still are attainable.

Took a loss this morning of 75$ which was on a pull back. 3 of my 4 losses and 1 of my break evens have been from a pull back when I entered on the first bar of the marked and it made 1 counter trend bar with in the next 3 bars. That's just how I am defining it I know people will have their own interpretations of it. But because of this I decided to review my trading plan for entering that early in the morning. All but 4 of my trade have been before 9:42 so I don't want to just stop trading this time period because if traded correctly it can be very profitable but I think in the near future I will be adjusting my stops losses until I get past the first 4 3 minute bars of the morning. I back tested the YTD and found there were 36 mornings where there was a pull back that would have caused me to loose out on a good trade. of these trades 19 of them where only by 2 tics! The other 17 were spread out from 3 to 7 tics, with 4 having the most out of the grouping.

I set my profit per at 100$ and ran the numbers to see if it was worth it to move it way down to 7 tics or where that point would be best at. I discovered anything over 2 tic below the first 3 minute bar would make me money in the long run. Moving it just 2 (well technically 3) below would increase my profit by 1550$ and dropping it down to 3 tics or more could still increase my profit more at as much as 750$. The amount of potential new profit is not enough for me to go an change my methodology right off and adding a bunch more risk even though in hind sight it looks to be a positive move. The only thing that this doesn't factor in is actual trend reversals in the period which I will look at but might turn it around to be a loosing endeavor and best to just keep it how it is right now.

Took my first back to back days with losses. It was inevitable that it would come at some point so I'm not worried. Still up a healthy profit to keep me trading how I know will work out in the long run. This was just another one I got caught up in the pull back that proved too big for my stop loss. I dont have much more to say for today. I will continue to watch the market until noon as usual. But unless I have a miracle Friday I will more than likely end up with a losing week as well. Thats it for today I will be back tomorrow with another update.


And sorry for the lack of visuals. I plan on putting more out, preferably daily. I just need to get over this cold and get caught up on some of my outside work and I will start displaying more for you guys to look at besides just a bunch of ramble.

I haven't posted for a while due to a busy schedule and the lack of trading. I watched the market on Friday but saw it gaping very large to begin the morning and knew thats where I had lost money that week so I decided to not place any trades which looks like it was a good idea because I am not sure how any of them would have worked out looking at charts. I also chose not to trade Monday being a holiday and decided to give my self a 3 day weekend.

10/14: It seems like my account is in free fall mode! just took my third loss in a row and my 4th in my last 5 trades. All of them have been on early morning pull backs so I think I'm am going to stop trading the first 9 minutes of the market because these pull backs are killing me right now. I know there are going to be some substantial draw downs but this one shouldnt be happening as all of my directions are correct I just cant seem to get in them when the time is right and I always get stopped out early. I am not any where to giving up on this method but its just frustrating knowing where some of my statistics should be and where they currently are. I am going to stop trading for today but when I get back form work I am going to go over every loosing trade to see if there is something obvious I can pick out with the draw downs and try to eliminate them or at least minimize the.

Most of my trades with in my paper trading run where just due to inexperience with the method so I had poor execution but now I have to put up with another obstacle. I guess I was getting too complacent this early and the market is just sending me a reminder that the journey will not be easy! Back again tomorrow!

So I spent a good time this evening going back through my logged back tests and the On Demand feature on TD Ameritrade to try to see why I was having trouble with these pull backs and if there was anything I could remedy to get away from taking all these losses with this issue. I quickly realized that if the market pre 9:30 was not in a tread based off of my rules that there was more likely to be a pull back and a loosing trade. So I have a new rule to my system! If the pre market is not in trend (consolidation) 9 minutes before the market that I will NOT be taking the opening trade that I get. Just by following this rule I would have eliminated 75% of the losses that were in my back testing that related to pull backs! So this makes me very happy that I can just protect myself just a little more.

Today I know I am not going to take a trade. Looking at the volatility today I know my small stops will get destroyed if I try to place a trade. But today does mark my first full month in the market! I am up 5.58% which is a very small increase since the end of September and a pretty big slide since I hit October 6th when I said I was calling it "full time". But I'm not going to complain about that large of an increase in my first month as a trader. Hopefully with my down time I will have everything set up for my trade set up visuals so you guys can see when and where I take my trades starting Tuesday (Monday I need to take off) at the latest.