This is a journal for me. I have been around trading forums before and have seen the good and the bad they bring out in people. The reason I joined futures.io (formerly BMT) was because after much lurking it seemed as though most people here are actually experienced, thoughtful and courteous traders here. (GaryD, comes to mind)
Bio:
Former US Air Force Officer (current US Air Force Organizational/Human efficiency engineer)
Coach Baseball, watch baseball...love baseball
Married and have 2 boys (who love baseball)
Anyway, I've been trading for about 5 years. Started with stocks, turned a $2k account into $28K by buying up Washington Mutual Preferred stock at @$1.45 per share and sold a good chunk on it's way up to $100 pps. After that I was hooked, I then used some of my profits to fund a forex account (back when forex was easy to do in the US w/ 500:1 leverage). I woke up 5 days a week at 0200 to trade the London open, which eventually took it's toll on me.
I had amazing success in Forex (until I became obsessed with "the perfect trade", you know the trade that you make and hold for 3+ hours raking in 100 pips in a day". I fell into the classic holy grail death sprial, so many of us have visited. At one point I had turned a $6K account into @$21K in less than 2 weeks. I started doubling my lot sizes etc...and of course lost it all.
But I had done it, been there and conquered the market (so I thought). It is that initial success that I have chasing ever since.
I took a break, read about the futures market and slowly started getting back into trading. So here I am ready to start a Journal for 2 reasons:
1. Accountability
2. Documentation of my experience (I used to take screen shots of my good trades but never the bad)
I will be posting my trades via screen shots which will show and document my DOM and Chart, so I can see what I was thinking at the time.
Why YM? Because I use 512t charts and it moves exactly like CL and at $5 per tick it just works for me. I have traded $200.00 ticks (pips) in the past and been whittled down to .10C pips as well. $5 per tick just works for me.
So clearly, I jumped the gun. Up Up Up. I updated my first post to show the kind of setup I trade. It's a pretty neat little visual cue that noticed and have been working to ID and trade effectively.
