How I started is covered earlier in the thread. Becoming emotionally detached from money is a gradual process. I've talked about it a lot, but basically it's just a progression in your trading size, taking small steps and getting comfortable at each new level you hit. I'm like anyone else, I screw things up and trade stupidly sometimes. The resulting loss is usually enough of a slap to the face to bring me around.
I trade pretty much every day. I'm just rounding off to the the nearest thousand. -$200, +$400 is a zero in this journal.
In my limited time studying the market I've noticed that news-of-the-moment (corporate officers retiring/resigning, buyout rumors, secondary offerings) results in reaction-based price moves that, if faded, have a high probability of reversing significantly, whereas fundamentally significant news (new regulations affecting long-term profitability, raised or lower earnings/revenue guidance, accounting fraud), results in price moves that have very shallow retraces and continue (often for days) in the same direction as institutional investors work to liquidate or accumulate very large positions. Do you ever take advantage of that inertia and trade in direction of the trend with fundamentally-affected stocks, or do you mainly trade for RTM?
Ha ha! I read a comment on ET once where someone was commenting on price just running higher and higher and you want to go short because buying seems so wrong at that point. The quote was something like, "You just have to hold your nose and buy."
Corey- I wanted to add my thanks for starting and maintaining your journal. You are a huge inspiration. I was a broker in the late 80's and a trader wannabe. I traded a little bit of everything, but more futures than stocks. My desire was to become a full time trader. I was a member of Dr. Van Tharp's very first Proprietary Trading Class in 1992. This was only a few years after the first Market Wizards was written, featuring Dr. Tharp. The premise of Van's Trading Class was to replicate what Richard Dennis did with the Turtles. That is, to teach us specific trading methods and provide $$ to trade with. The class ended up being light on trading techniques and a complete failure in raising / providing trading capital. I don't know if he ever attempted another class like it or not. I didn't have a lot of capital to trade with after the Van Tharp class and ended up getting involved and later owning a business that grew to be fairly large (125 employees). I sold that business 3 yrs ago. I had given up on the dream of being a full-time proprietary trader. But reading your Journal rekindles my desire. I now have the capital and time to pursue it. The question is (which I have to answer), should I? I have a mindset that fully automated, mechanical trading systems, at their best, can marginally outperform a market on a long term basis or fail at a variety of levels. I felt that the only way to consistently, month after month, year after year, make $$ trading is to include a substantial degree of discretion. Based on what I've read in this journal, your approach includes both mechanical input and discretion. This, combined with good money management is why you profit consistently. Wow, how inspiring this all is! Thank you for sharing all that you have. mu2pilot
This has been a real problem for me. I always want to trade countertrend...it's the pessimist in me, but it's not a good mindset.
Every new trader should read this five or six hundred times. Some very good building blocks of quite a few strats in there.
I'm not sure about that one. If Steve Jobs retired or resigned, I doubt that would be an intraday fade. And Google recently had an anti-trust investigation announced by the EU - it had a 1 day selloff then rallied 10% in 2 weeks from the close of that day.