An Ordinary Trader's Journey to Extraordinary

Discussion in 'Journals' started by TraderToad, Aug 25, 2012.

  1. Welcome to my thread!

    I am starting this trading journal in an effort to help me become a better trader. Hopefully, others will join in and it can be a great learning experience for everyone. Unfortunately, I cannot trade everyday because I do have a full time job that I must keep to pay my bills for now. When I do trade, I will post my results here. In addition, I may be evaluating charts on the days that I cannot trade as well to improve my price action skills. I am currently trading in the simulator and going to do so until I feel that I am completely ready. I am not a big fan of indicators and prefer to study price and areas of interest when trading. Welcome aboard and enjoy the entertainment!

    TraderToad
     
  2. Nice to see another NQ trader around here.

    Best of luck to you!
     
  3. Thanks jas_in_hbca and welcome!

    Now that you mention it, there does not seem to be many NQ threads here on ET. NQ seems to be a good fit for me right now for many different reasons. Mainly, I have limited trading capital and NQ's price action offers good follow-through when it decides to get trendy. Hopefully others will take notice of this thread, contribute, and we can all learn together :D .
     
  4. Fridays results attached.
     
  5. Nice trading!
     
  6. Thanks for the compliment bmwhendrix!
     
  7. Today I had to go to work and was unable to trade. I did study my NQ chart this evening in an attempt to further increase my price action skill/knowledge. I know, everything makes more sense after the fact, but this is just an exercise I do to help train my eye for the real deal. See the attached chart if you would like to step inside my mind for a moment.

    From my calculations, NQ only had a 17.50pt range today. This is nothing special by any means, making trading more challenging. I only found 4 entries on the chart that interested me. Hard to really say what I would have actually done if I was able to trade in the simulator today.

    I supposed to work again tomorrow and will be unable to trade again. I am hoping that I can see some action in the simulator on Wed, Thu, and Fri.

    Feel free to add any comments, suggestion, personal charts/results, etc.

    TraderToad
     
  8. Just found out I get tomorrow off from work. :D
     
  9. Today was a tough day for me overall. I had a difficult time reading the price. Another tight range day (19.5pts) for NQ. I also felt a little more impulsive and impatient this morning. Kids were a bit more distracting than usual and the family plans we had later in the afternoon was weighing on my mind. Guess it just wasn't meant to be today.

    Even though this is simulated trading, I do have a max pt loss range (10-12.5pts) for each session I trade. When I go live, this will allow me to preserve my capital to trade another day when things don't go as planned like today.

    Today I finished -11.5pts

    7 trades

    1 Winner
    6 Losers

    TraderToad
     
  10. Tough trading day with the NQ again. It seems like when NQ trends well, I do okay. If NQ is more range bound, I struggle big-time with my style of trading. My accuracy has been very poor the last few days with NQ as well.

    I also decided to play with CL again today and had good results. I have done very well trading CL in the past, but just stayed away because of lack of capital. I guess I can find the capital if I become highly skilled at trading CL.

    From here on out, I am going to be trading both NQ and CL to see which index fits my style better.

    NQ

    4 trades

    0 Winners
    4 Losers

    CL

    2 Trades

    1 Winners
    0 Losers
    1 Breakeven
     
    #10     Aug 30, 2012