Thirty years old, fascinated by the markets since 2008, went from stocks to options to futures, consistently lose money whenever trading is attempted (actually, usually goes well followed by drawdown/blowing the account). I feel almost like an impostor in the "Elite" journal section, but in real life, when surrounded by the best, my best comes out.
I've had, for many years now, an excellent "feel" for the market, but until recently, couldn't distinguish between impulse and intuition, which I heard in one of the webinars here on futures.io (formerly BMT), and which rang a huge bell somewhere in my head.
My biggest source of problems in the past was either getting mini-stopped to death (I'm typically better at that now), or occasionally and impulsively removing the stop on a trade. It doesn't matter how good your market "feel" if all your money magically disappears.
Somewhat interestingly, I've often lose huge sums of money at the very end of a month, or on a Friday. In other words, because I've tried to track my progress, I get caught trying to juice the numbers at the last minute. Last month, for example, I was up a good 130 ticks or so in CL coming into the last week of the month - maybe nothing for you all, but I was ecstatic - and it somehow all went away and more in the last couple days. Comments on this phenomenon welcome.
I get this is a cookie cutter story, everything wholly predictable, etc. But something about being [a little] older, realizing the true potential power of harnessing a somewhat scalable method, etc., does make me believe that I can do this. I basically only ever got A/A+ in every subject in school growing up. Within the last several years I've come to see how much that screwed me up :egg:, especially in trading where you must embrace being wrong all the time. I now see "average" students from my youth making six figures left and right, and realizing I had it all wrong the whole time.
Patience is key, waiting for the right setups. I find German Shepherds brilliant and beautiful at the same time. One of their more desirable traits is an even temperament, a clear mind. In other words, a gun can go off a foot from their head, and if well-trained, they'll continue their police work without a thought.
It's fun to pretend to be a steadfast Harry Potter character, or someone you look up to, but recently, if I've been feeling impulsive in trading, I just imagine that I'm a German Shepherd :)
I want to do this for a living. Let's see what happens...