1) I want to hold myself accountable, hence the title "Mentally Challenged" -- since it's a mental challenge to stay disciplined. 2) Trader, because I want to be a trader and not have to work at Starbux or McDonald's anymore 3) Because X-Treme Profits will get me out of my mom's basement and, 4) Dot Com, just because. I'm trying to become an auto-trader, but have occasionally done stupid things like manually intervening in my trading. I figure public humiliation and accusations from people on ET will only help improve self-esteem and turn me into the kind of winner I want to be. Today: -$195. Systems generated $40 Discretionary trading was the rest of the loss. Part of my difficulty is that I don't want to put lots of money into the automated system, so I let it run while trading by hand. Usually, this results in a profit. Today, for whatever reason, I was totally undisciplined. I'm trying to vow NOT to do this anymore.
On a more serious note, I'm more interested in just documenting what I do that's wrong. I know what I'm doing is wrong, I've got the post-it notes to tell me what I'm doing is wrong, but somehow the discipline just needs to develop. At least, for me, historically, it's been a steady upslope in profits and then, bam, I do something dumb. I should also say that I don't intend to trade serious money in this thread until I get my head checked out. You are more likely to see profits on the order of $10 and $20 than $1000 or $2000. This is not the thread for trading, this is the thread for psychology. My current theory on why I do things that are dumb is because when I'm auto-trading, I actually get bored and start looking for action. When I do this, I start to drift into a "what if I did this" and then "what if I did that". I also think this is why day jobs tend to bore me also, because I just get flooded with ideas some of which don't even make sense, and start drifting. What I need is a plan to attack this mental drift. As a challenge to myself, tomorrow, I will do zero discretionary trades. A very simple, one-step resolution. I will write back here when I accomplish this task. EDIT: Wanted to add one more thing. Yesterday, I made $119.50, because I was watching baseball while my code was trading. I stayed away from tinkering. So I am absolutely sure that it's the boredom angle that's preventing me from succeeding.
+$24. My hard disk died on me and started clicking all over the place. I'm not going to trade for another 3 days for technical reasons. I did not do any discretionary trades and it was an otherwise calm day. Mostly focused on software and research. So today: - No mentally challenged behavior [+1] - Got to be a trader [+1] - No extreme profits [-1] - No Dot Com or Web 2.0 Business Started [-1] Self-Performance Score: 0
+0. No trades. Waiting for account adjustments, which requires waiting for settlements. - Did not engage in mentally challenged behavior (+1) - Was not a trader today (-1) - No X-Treme profits (-1) - Did not start a dot com business (-1) Self Performance Score: -2
Hey man Im mentally handicapped too and this thread is an inspiration to me I got diagnosed with aspergers but am still functional I worked at a some web 2.0 companies and others during the tech bubble so I know what you mean when you say you stay away from making a new .com I tried many times as well but now I want to trade even though I cant do math well I can do high level math but I always make arithmetic mistakes for example lets say I want to buy 500 shares of CVS and short 300 shares of WAG I cant do it right and I end up buying weird numbers because I cant do arithmetic quickly. Do you have any advice for someone like me? Maybe I can help you you can be my Bruce Willis and Ill be your lil retarded boy a mutually beneficial relationship, please PM me.
Take some programming classes, work out the math, and let the computer do the number crunching for you. Props for being mentally handicapped. I know I am.
-$19 yesterday +$13 today (2600 shares) At one point in the day, my system was up around $45, everything was firing correctly, money was rolling in, I'd never been happier. Then that GS news hit, blew out all my predictions, and I was experiencing a nightmare, live. I made the decision to manually correct a position when it was $150 against me. When I realized the numbers involved were wrong, I worked out on paper where the program should have been had it been correct, so I compensated in the direction of being correct. I don't think this counts against my no discretionary rule, but does tell me there's a lot of work to be done in terms of correcting my code and trading setup. My software's complexity has grown, and it's difficult to test everything without taking these small risks. It was bug after bug after bug today. I'm more mentally handicapped today than I was yesterday. +1 No seriously mentally challenged behavior +1 Got to be a trader -1 No Extreme Profits -1 No wildly successful dot com business started Self performance score: 0
+$170.39 Clean execution today, all signals worked. Wrote down a few ideas to filter losers more effectively, but still need a decent reporting interface. I think I'm going to go outside and take a long walk, because I was hunched over the computer all weekend working to fix my software, and I wrote a lot of code. I am really tired, even though I got 8 hours last night. Less code, more gym perhaps? One temptation I get during the day is to override the automated system. Keeping true to this journal helps me avoid the shame of disaster, for whatever reason. I guess public scrutiny makes me much more self-conscious. - Did not engage in mentally challenged behavior (+1) - Was a trader today (+1) - No X-Treme profits (-1) - Did not start a dot com business (-1) Self-performance score: 0
all I can say is good luck always remember that every time you fail there is an ARMY of you just like you sitting in front of computer this is a hard game to figure out 1 out of 100 makes it. make sure you give it 3-5 years Do not give it 10 years that is wrong.