This is a poem I wrote a while back when I started trading professionally. Tell me what you guys think: Trading Woes Your raving rant I understand Your raging wrath I comprehend Your humble suffering I see You are a trader lost at sea The Level Two - your broken mast The prints are fast - too vast to grasp The Nasdaq futures are askew You are a trader - you are new The shark-like spread will eat your flesh The market's locked, it won't refresh Your scud* is shot and you can't short The uptick rule - your last resort The market makers are its breakers The mirage Islands are just fakers The ECNs will hold the line They drown the profits one more time The trading woes of money lost The total fee and total cost The low low ratio today Make up for gains another day --- * scud = bullets at our firm
5K in my account, Got the world on a plate, going to make the dough, gonna get that hot date, 4.9k in my account, lost a trade, that's ok because, I've got it made, 4.6k and going down, I start to look around, can't go out on the town, I'm crashing into the ground Next week getting worse, losing my ass and it hurts, I'm calling bottoms and tops, and getting my butt wopped. Now I'm down a grand, I thought I was the best, but I'm failing here, like 90% of the rest. So I stop and pause, before I hit a brick wall, trade what I see not what I think, before my account continues to sink. The girl's outside, I lied about the car, I can't even afford a night at the bar, she ditches me and drives away, so I sit at my computer and play. Chaos theory, fractals and neural nets, I'm the man, I'll win this bet, slowly I realize it is all within, gotta stop taking trades on a whim. Days go by and my equity curve slows down, I'm pulling up from hitting the ground, Cut my losses and let the profits fly, there goes my equity curve up into the sky.