I want to keep making this thread a serious one were other trader's participate and learn from each other. Hence, I took the liberty of answering JTrades first two questions: When did you first get interested in trading? The company I was working for went belly up in 2008. A friend of mine kept saying that he was making money buying Apple stocks, I thought what the heck, let me try my hand at this game of buying stocks as well. The first stock I ever purchased was Goldman Sachs in the early spring of 2009 and it kept going up, I thought this was too easy, gave up searching for a job, put all of my savings into a brokerage account and started buying and selling stocks. Of course, I did not have a clue as to what I was doing looking back at it. I didn’t even now what a trend was or support and resistance lines were and I just purchased stocks on a whim especially stocks that the crew on Fast Money on CNBC were buying. I was actually making a few hundred here and there and not losing money at all, I thought this is easy money (terrible naïve newbie realization, as you must all agree) I have got to go all in, I have to learn everything about the markets. So I started buying and reading every trading book that was recommended on the chat boards. From this reading and exploring I discovered trading futures, I discovered that you could day trade futures and that you didn’t need $25K to day trade them, the day trading leverage of futures were 4 to 1, no uptick rule on shorting, that the markets were virtually open 23 hours. Alas, I was not ready to start trading futures after 3 months or so of trading stocks. I got killed every way possible as you can imagine. More importantly, my psyche got all messed up. Anxiety, fear and all other nasty emotions flared up fully in my trading and in my everyday life. I had problems sleeping. I had trouble even entering a trade. Those days of thinking this was a business of easy money were long gone, it seemed like the pits of hell. But I was all in, fully invested, down a ton of $$, there was no turning back, I had to make it work. For some it can take years to reach consistent profitability. How was the learning process for you; was it painful and costly or relatively quick and easy? Yes! It took me years at least 5 years to become comfortable trading. The learning process was extremely painful and very costly to say the least. But I can consistently on a weekly basis be net profitable now, I am no market wizard but I can hold my own. I know that I am trading against myself, I am trading against the voice in my head that is telling me to sell too early or let my losses get too big. I am trading against my psyche that wants to avoid pain and gravitate towards pleasure. It still can be a fight with myself on some days, but it does get easier. The thing is the human mind has a very hard time dealing with uncertainty, and one has to train their mind to accept uncertainty and one has to be able to wade in an uncertain environment continuously as a trader – easier said than done. But one does realize its all about accepting responsibility for one’s actions, the action to let it keep running, the action to cut the losses, the action to enter when one sees their edge appear, the action to accept losses as a natural part of trading. For those of you that learn to trade without much pain and losses, kudos to you, but for most others, one needs to pay one’s dues before one becomes good at anything. And in trading the dues can be overwhelming at times. I’d love to answer more questions.
Those weird characters in place of apostrophes and quotation marks made the damn thing unreadable. Or at least too bothersome to suffer through.
Yes, I had several. I think the key eureka moment was the absolute necessity to detach emotion from outcomes and to judge success on the basis of carrying out the trading process correctly, irrespective of outcome. Once success became measured in terms of consistent execution of a positive expectancy set of strategies, and once I became able to consistently execute, I was pretty much there.
Another key moment in my evolution as a trader was the focus on controlling risk as opposed to the focus on something that was out of my control, namely reward.
No! I never did revive the job search. I didn't have to. The spouse had a great paying job which continued to allowed me to trade.
Interview CONVEXX--- the guy is the last great ET trader-- but make him speak normal english, not made up option jargon.