Greetings. Like many others on here I've been looking for a "community" to join and been lurking/browsing various sites. Based out of California.
My wife and I started stocks short term (intraday and 1-3 days) March 09 with a very simplistic trade selection and risk management approach.
As we started learning more we started taking losses (were up about 40K at peak, ended up about 16K) - pleased with results for the first year.
We did very little trading from August to December as we were experimenting with various methodologies (backtesting in Tradestation) and are now focused in on Todd Mitchell's courses supplemented concepts from Farley and Nison (we're also waiting for Al Brook's book to arrive).
My wife's day-trading e-mini futures and I'm with a small set of stocks (usually from the set of AAPL, GS, AMZN, POT, OIH, RIG, FCX, SPG depending on ATRs/vol from the last 2 weeks).
We're are both bouncing between simulated and live trading on a day-by-day basis depending upon whether or not we actually followed our methodology or emotions ruled the day.
We just moved our office setups to different rooms in the house as we've found when we talk out loud during the trading time (e.g. call out setups, call out weaknesses in setups, call out target prices, explicitly state out loud something like "this *is* my trade") it helps us remain much more objective. Same thing with over-micro-managing a position once we are in it - talking out loud keeps us both from futzing too much with stops/profit targets.
Goal for this year is for one (preferably both but at least one of us) to prove enough consistency that I'll leave my full time position in corporate (I currently trade for about 2 hours before heading in to work).
Anyhows - that's probably enough rambling.
CharlieD
My wife and I started stocks short term (intraday and 1-3 days) March 09 with a very simplistic trade selection and risk management approach.
As we started learning more we started taking losses (were up about 40K at peak, ended up about 16K) - pleased with results for the first year.
We did very little trading from August to December as we were experimenting with various methodologies (backtesting in Tradestation) and are now focused in on Todd Mitchell's courses supplemented concepts from Farley and Nison (we're also waiting for Al Brook's book to arrive).
My wife's day-trading e-mini futures and I'm with a small set of stocks (usually from the set of AAPL, GS, AMZN, POT, OIH, RIG, FCX, SPG depending on ATRs/vol from the last 2 weeks).
We're are both bouncing between simulated and live trading on a day-by-day basis depending upon whether or not we actually followed our methodology or emotions ruled the day.
We just moved our office setups to different rooms in the house as we've found when we talk out loud during the trading time (e.g. call out setups, call out weaknesses in setups, call out target prices, explicitly state out loud something like "this *is* my trade") it helps us remain much more objective. Same thing with over-micro-managing a position once we are in it - talking out loud keeps us both from futzing too much with stops/profit targets.
Goal for this year is for one (preferably both but at least one of us) to prove enough consistency that I'll leave my full time position in corporate (I currently trade for about 2 hours before heading in to work).
Anyhows - that's probably enough rambling.
CharlieD
