A friend told me recently that trading no longer fascinated him. He's been trading for 20 years and has some really big wins under his belt. Instead, he intimated that the lifestyle that trading related activities provided him was his passion. In other words, trading was something that allowed him to do what he loved away from trading.

This is not the first time I have heard this. The guy that got me into trading said basically the same thing. He said the first couple of years trading would be an obsession then you would start making money with a defined edge and then over time trading would become boring while the lifestyle you dreamed of took the place of the passion you once felt for trading. This is assuming you have something to live for outside of work. Otherwise just work 24/7.

I admit I fall into this category. I like trading. I like many things about it. However, what I love about it is the ability over time to indulge and follow my other passions which require money but do not produce it.

So can you be successful doing it like this despite what the TED talk said? I think so. Passion is what counts. If you need to do something that produces income to pursue the passion that doesn't, then be really good at it so you can fully indulge yourself away from that income source.

I might be on the wrong track here but I do think this is possible. I know at least two people that do it.

Good luck on your journey and thanks for reading.

Hey buddy, I love ya to death but that's classic Keynesian economics that's failed us for the most of the last century. Its an experiment that's failed.

Thomas Jefferson: “The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless... ”

Anyway, I stuck the video here on my thread not to discuss its merits but to have a place where I can always find it.....I don't want to hijack my own trading journal with economics.....I posted the video in the off topic area as well. W can discuss it there.

All daily intermediate support levels broken last few days. Looking for shorts only. Waiting for the charts to get in sync before shorting.

Once I started getting a red bar on the 10M chart, I knew it was time. 1M level was broken, 5M was screaming, time to short......

Went short first trade with max size looking for a conservative exit. +15 ticks. The reason for the conservative exit was I look for a retest of the break down area after the impulse leg and I wanted out of the trade if the retest turned into a break higher.

The impulse leg was tested, got a minor trend line break and I went short max allowable size. This time I knew we'd probably see a flush out down to some daily support but truthfully did not expect what happened. I moved my target down to +50 ticks expecting it to take some time to get there. Instead, I basically blinked and my target was filled. Nice when that happens of course but it does contribute to unrealistic expectations for other trades.

+65 ticks today and time to go be daddy at least for an hour before the princess heads off to violin practice.

Cheers...

Man alive! Do you write romance novels when you're not trading?

I've been writing like this ever since I left (or rather, was asked to leave) the yeshiva for reasons shrouded in great secrecy and mystery. I got an adjunct position at a community college to support my six children, various habits, and other predilections. I taught Kaballah and other religious studies, and since my medications no longer worked, the "visions" that I thought I was having turned out to be just the consequence of drug interactions. I've often thought about pursuing a doctorate in literature, but instead I've been deconstructing rap lyrics using a post-modern paradigm, but continue to have trouble understanding some of the deeper symbolism within these texts. Apparently, this is not au contraire to monpere, oui?

As I mentioned a few days ago, I won a trading journal/spreadsheet from @mattz at Optimus Trading Group. I promptly forgot about it until today.

I've kept them in the past and like all good things, I have gotten lazy about keeping my stats. Matt at Optimus has been talking to me about making my trading more like a business and I realized today that I have neglected this aspect of my trading for a while.

So I decided to take my trades from last Monday through today and manually input them. I chose last Monday because that's when I really began looking for confluence between MTFs in a manner that reflects live trading. The two weeks prior to this were just experiments to see if I could see it all happening real time. I also made some minor modifications to my trading chart as well from a 2M to a 1M during this time as well.

The first few days were tough. I had some mental errors, some money management mistakes and a couple exit mistakes. That being said, as I began to get more comfortable with it, the performance began to improve and my winners started to overtake the losers in terms of profit.

The data in the pic is NOT what I expected to see. My win rate is quite a bit lower than what I thought I was running. Also, my profits were derived from fairly large winners in terms of dollars. This was accomplished with both size and distance. The larger winners were due to size and couple were due to runners. Seems like I need some of both.

The spreadsheet will track a bunch of other things that I have not put in but going forward, I can input the set up, trend vs counter trend, day of week and a few other things that may or not be important.

Since I'm doing far fewer trades than I used to, inputting them should be less of a chore than it was before.

I will try to post the summary every day if I have time.