The dream to trade.

OK what a lively discussion. I’ll have to change my words to the goal to trade full-time and travel. Everybody’s being so literal about me using the word dream.

I know I doubt I’ve spent 20,000 hours on it but I’ve spent a lot and I’ve invested a lot of my energy and aspirations and hope for the future.

I guess it would be nice if those closest to us could support it. But they just don’t understand trading. case in point is my closest friend. For the most part he keeps all of his money in the bank and has about 5% of his total inheritance in some index mutual funds. so he thinks that makes him an expert and tells me all the reasons I shouldn’t do this and just get a “regular job and be happy with that“

 

So where are you exactly with your goal/dream. Anywhere close to achieving it?

 

I was very close during the run from November 2020 through about July 2021. During that time I was making far more money trading than I was from my sales job, and when my sales job contract ended April 1 trading was my only endeavor and I loved it

Then small cap and microcap stocks stopped working. I have been scrambling ever cents to get my hands around a strategy that can produce any kind of consistent returns. Today was a good day for me I Made double what I make at my sales job on a daily basis.

previous to that run I had that I mentioned above I was really close to shutting down my medical recruiting business as my trading was doing very very well. That was 2018 and I was trading futures at the time on the major index only.

so basically I’ll have a really good run for six months or so and then whatever I’m doing stops working. Or what I used to do was veer outside my plan but I’m finally able to not do that any longer.

 

Have you been able to pinpoint why it stopped working.

 

As far as small cap and micro cap it was just a shift away from the whole asset class. I was buying 2 to 3 pics at the close or very early and after hours. Holding until the open next day and selling. It worked really good. I’ve continued to back test that strategy and it just flat stopped working.

right now my trading is focused on earnings beats or earnings disappointments compared to expectations. It’s too early to tell if I can produce consistent results from that but so far so good.

this thread was not meant to be a technical discussion about trading strategies. It was more about what it’s like for the life of a trader.

 

Well if you don't have a good strategy life can sometimes be quite depressing.

Everyone's a genius in a bull market and can find someone else to blame in a bear. You'll get a lot of I told you so's when you're in a slump and a lot of you just got lucky when things are cooking. No one wants to see you succeed at something that doesn't seem to require any special skill. It's easy, a couple mouse clicks and you put money in your bank account.

Good luck or should I say Good Trading

 

Same. My mother is negative but then I know this is what I want. If you want it that bad go get it and ignore the naysayers.

 

You are right. It may be the to analyse the past efforts and figure out all the gains and losses. Maybe it is time to totally change the approach.

 

Trading is a fool's game. It's my full time income but never forget that you need prior life experiences to have the skills to make this work. You can't buy books, read message forums or watch YouTube videos and learn to trade profitably imo. Just like creating any new business you will have to create something new. Your strategies will divide as either quantitative or not. You said you are "back testing a strategy" so I wonder if your background is in math and engineering. If not then maybe experience in other markets is helpful and you can leverage that experience to make subjective decisions.

Your family and friends that do not trade will have a view of trading from something they briefly saw online. They probably imagine you looking at charts in TOS and clicking the buy or sell button based on some pattern a trading guru explained. They won't imagine deeply quantitative research or sitting on the board of small privately held companies that may go public or get a buyout offer.

So maybe try to reframe for them what you are doing. Renaissance Technologies is technically a day trader but they would never refer to themselves as day traders.

 

We are only given one life to live (AFAIK) so why worry about living a life someone else decides we should live instead?