The time has now come. The check should arrive any day. What does this mean? It means that I am going to be trading ES future contracts and posting the results of my trading each day here in my journal. To give you some background, I have traded in the past but had to eventually stop due to school and work concerns. My trading success was erratic, but I attribute this to not taking it seriously. Well, now I am going to take it more seriously. I have a system which has done well on a simulated account. I feel that I am ready to begin trading (1) contract for a month to see how I perform. One of three things will happen: I will make money I seriously doubt that, after a month of trading, that I will be significantly net positive. However, if I am, I will review the entire month and decide if it will be wise to increase to a larger position (2 contracts). I will lose money Nobody likes to lose money, but I have a feeling I will lose money due to learning order entry, order-flow, etc. I will make a large effort not to stray from my system and to apply strict discipline in following my trading rules. I will break even This would be nice. Again, I expect to either break-even or lose money after one month. Each day that I trade, I will give a report of the times of my trades and other information about the trades. This is for the benefit of all -- but mainly for myself as I progress in my knowledge of futures trading. My journal will be divided into three categories: Preface This part of each daily entry will consist of a quick introduction to the day, what happened and how I felt during trading. Trade Summary This section will contain all of my trades for the day and the times they were made. Profit and loss will also be calculated in this section. Summation This is where I will reflect on the day and write about the lessons I have learned and how I can take those lessons with me into the next trading day to increase my performance. -------------- Now, I would appreciate it if people who find my journal of value to make comments. Many people on this board have a lot of knowledge and I would like to draw from that. I also hope that my journal can offer something back to this board. I have been reviewing many other journals and I do thank those who have been keeping them up-to-date. Thank you for participating with me on this personal journey into futures. My eventual goal is to discover if trading futures is right for me -- and if I should continue it as a supplement to other endeavors. Thanks!
Hi aphie, Looking forward to your journal. I wish you all the best with your trading. If you don't mind me asking, how large of an account will you start with, and how will you be trading (style/plan)? /JT
I too am looking forward to it.......and I'm pretty sure I speak for the other 13,174 members of this board. Good luck.
Thank you! I will be starting with $5,000 and using esignal for my datafeed and Interactive Brokers as my broker. I will be trading one contract (obviously) and using price action, charts, TRIN, TICK and several other indicators. I will also be using a few moving averages, but that is the extent of the TA that I will be using. If I make more than 10 trades with my system in one day, I will be over-trading. I expect to average 5 trades per day.
aphie, Good luck. Sounds like you have a decent idea of what you need to do. In my experience, the current markets are difficult and tricky but offer some good daily ranges if you hit them right.
Aphie If you spend half as much time working on your system (maybe you do, I don't know) as you do posting here... I would say you have a better than average chance in this business.