There are lots of people on this site looking for a mentor. I was fortunate enough to find a mentor. He manages a fund where the AUM < 20 mil. 20 mil is not a huge amount of money but it was a 1 man shop and about 4 mil was his own money. There were 5 people that worked there: 1 Office manager, 1 programmer, 1 Sales guy, 1 intern (me) and the big guy himself. My job was basically to get Diet Dr. Pepper and lunch for him. After working there for a while I was able to look at the daily trading statements and work with the programmer too. The big guy mostly traded grains and US bonds, and S&P every once in a while. It was all position trades and absolutely no day-trading at all. You might think why I'm posting all these if I had a chance to learn from a successful manager. My problem is that I am not disciplined enough to follow the rules. I got a long signal on 7/19/2006. I went long that day but got scared and closed the position next day. After that I thought the market should not be going much higher and I shorted SP- got stopped out and shorted more and got stopped out again and so on. Hopefully with this journal, I will be disciplined enough to follow my rules. As we go forward together I'll post in details but for any one interested I recommend you read Gary Smith's How I trade for a Living. (You can probably find a used book for less than $20), or pick it up from your local library. His methods were close to my mentor's methods with few additions/filters. More to come later.
"My problem is that I am not disciplined enough to follow the rules" This is the most important first step. 100% of failure in trading is due to lack of mental discipline and 99% of the people who start trading will never make it because they will never be able to develop that discipline. The next step is to learn to respect risk, as in zero tolerance for risk. You should get into trades not because of how much you expect to make, but how much you can afford to lose. You seem like a good kid. keep your head down and your ego in check and you'll make it. Question is, are you disciplined enough to post updates regularly?
Quote from doublea: I went long that day but got scared and closed the position next day. ______________________________ Get "scared" out of your system, being afraid has no place in trading. Think & act like a trader, not like a scared newbie, being emotional while trading has no value. Learn to execute like a robot & condition your mind to feel nothing & you just might get somewhere.
Thanks for the thread. Info is alwasy a good thing. Here's some of my own. Before you enter another trade, read this book: Enhancing Trading Performance Study it. Apply it. Then trade with the knowledge and abilities that it gives you. Brett's a well known trading psychologist (he even posts here sometimes), and this should be a good start, but it definitely should not be the end. Regards, JJ
Exactly, that's the reason for this journal to overcome the fears. I was long SPY and ES, and I'm still long SPY. I wish I had done the same thing with ES too. So basically I'm making money on stocks and losing on futures. Maybe futures is not for me. We'll find out.
Lots of things. Will post more later today. I usually do not come to ET or any site during the market hour.
doublea... Are you sure you want to be posting stuff that goes on in the fund? Be very careful with what you post about your internship job... Compliance.