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I'm starting this journal because like most beginners, I find I intently study with hard work and discipline and then get on the trading room floor, and flounder about aimlessly shooting off trades at half thought out plans. I say I'm going to write trades down and in the end I just go and start reading something else. I started with spot forex in September and am just moving to currency futures instead. I'm moving to futures mainly because of the hours, I really hate getting up at 1 a.m. CST. I'd like to be able to trade the ES and have a regular morning sometime in the future. Still setting up my account with InfinityAT and Sierra Chart. I'm in a unique situation in life that leaves me with complete freedom to learn and trade all day and all night if I wish, with $3000 of capital (way under capitalized). With all this time I've been studying mostly VSA, basic market manipulation knowledge, and beginning to learn market delta & footprinting. I've studied all the Tradeguider stuff, Pete Fader's material and daytradingforexlive.com
So far I've been a break even trader. If I stuck to anyone of these plans I've learned and only traded them I'm sure I'd be at least a bit profitable. My goal right now isn't profit I guess, just to learn. I like to learn and dig at the truth and I just can't stop. I don't think any one system has an advantage over another, they are all very personal and I don't think I suffer from that ailment I read of a lot, moving from one trading system to the other searching for a holy grail. I haven't put that many trades in, mostly a lot of study.
Brief Bio: I'm 33 and I live on a 30 acre organic farm. I work for my room and board and my good friend owns the place. My girlfriend and her boy live here with me. I've always been drawn to subjects that take obsessive qualities to master. I play guitar and mainly delivered pizza or gardened for my jobs. I was a Starcraft player in highschool (almost moved to S. Korea to play professionally (long story)) and moved on to limit hold'em online poker (I hate no limit btw). I lived off of that for a few years then joined a band and toured around the world a couple times. Got sick of the city and bands and moved back to were I grew up in the woods. Here I am now. Started reading a few currency trading books at the bookstore by accident and got interested in August of '14. Bought daytradingforexlive.com's course and studied that before I ever put $ into an account. Their stuff is simple and easy and makes money. Tradeguider and Pete Fader's stuff is also great in my opinion. I just find I want to know more and I want to see inside the candlesticks and bars, to really understand whats going on (to whatever extent that is possible) on my chart. I didn't know that was possible to actually see inside a bar until I found all the Market Delta stuff (glad to see Seirra Chart can do the same stuff as MarketDelta for next to nothing).
I don't have a lot of pressure to make $ and live off of it right this minute. I have next to no bills and the girlfriend is the most understanding and helpful person I know, and she has a great job, so no problems there. I've only got 3k to trade with but I won't be hurting if its all blown away. My first few weeks of trades will probably have to be on a sim account until I get my roll online, and even after that, probably just the GBP/USD, since that's half the size of the Euro contract. Neither are even safe for my roll but the Pound is closer to 2% risk with my day trading style.
I'd like to thank Big Mike for this site and all the knowledge on it. I've watched many hours of the webinar's you've posted since I found your site a few weeks ago. Hopefully this helps me by being more accountable and I hope its interesting for others to watch a novice try and grow. I'm barely a beginner so don't take my advice or analysis for a grain of salt. I expect my forthcoming posts to be rather terse compared with this one.
Legendary / Stochastic Calculus is not your friend
Experience: None
Platform: Ninjatrader, Python API
Broker: CQG
Trading: S&P, Crude, Gold
Posts: 866 since Oct 2009
Thanks Given: 3,480
Thanks Received: 1,550
Have you been trading at all?....with $3k to trade with, have you considered opening a micro forex account? You can get a lot of bang for your buck while you are learning to trade your method.
Yep, I've been trading just about every day and backtesting otherwise. I have my own method I put together and am a million lightyears ahead of where I was when I started this journal. Hope to say the same thing 1/2 year from now as well.