Full Time Newbie Journal

[P.I.T.]

Hi Guys,

This is my journal, I've been trading full time since 2012. Well, although it's "Full Time", I've a part time job (freelancer) which covers all my bills and put food on my table with a few hundreds left for savings. I work for on average 5 hours per week for my part time job and 10 minutes on average per day for my trading business. I consider trading as "Full Time" mainly because my primary source of income is from trading and since 2013 I keep trim down my part time job and hopefully will fully cut it off some day in the future soon. As you might have guess, I'm a swing and position trader and most of my trades last from weeks to months.

A little bit of my background, before I get into this trading business, I've had 3 physical business (1 MLM). All of them doesn't make a lot of money and it doesn't interest me, it's so tired to deal with people and complains and that motivates me to search for other kind of business and I found trading is quite interesting. That's how I get into trading. Well, I'm not going to go through all the loses like blowing up account, being scammed and others which is too long for the first post and most of us know it when we first get our feet wet in this business.

Back to the real business, this journal isn't going to be a normal journal that journals all my entries and exits as I've already own an excel that record all these with screenshots. However, I will share a few setups from time to time to discuss with fellow traders here. This journal will mostly record my emotions, thinking, experiences and new stuffs that I've learn along the way and hopefully someday when I look back, it will be a colorful journal full with the wisdom shared by fellow experience traders here.

Besides trading, I do learn how to invest and manage my personal finances. But most of my efforts are in trading. I love trading and investing so much because it keep my mind young and fresh all the time! I keep thinking and learning everyday! It's really fun and exciting!

OK, lets follow the template provided by T2W to make this journal easy to read.

• Objectives
The objectives is to learn new stuff from experience traders here and also receive comments from the pros here and hang around with the serious traders (You know, trading is a lonely business, no one in your family understand your alien language!).

• Markets & Instruments
I trade currencies, commodities, indices, US and Singapore Shares. Mostly trade indices, commodities and currencies. Stock are for longer term position trading (Mostly high dividend paying stocks, especially REITs and I'm still pretty new to this, started trading US stocks since Dec 2013).

• Style
I'm a swing trader and position trader.

• Timeframes
My trading time frame range from 4 hours to monthly. Most of the time I use daily and weekly time frame and only use 4 hours chart for currencies.

• Reversals, Breakouts or Retracements?
Mainly retracements as it sounds the most logical way to trade for me. But I do not limit myself to retracements only.

• Trade Set Up
I'm a discretionary trader and I don't have a very precise and rigid set of rules like systematic traders have. I've a trading plan that provides a framework and guidelines for me to trade.

Example trading an Inside Bar, sometimes when the trend is strong and the fundamentals are strongly in my favor, I will buy at the break of inside bar instead of buying at the break of mother bar. I also take fundamentals into account when executing trades. I mainly trade with candlestick, chart patterns (Favorites: triangle, pennants and rectangle) and price action (support/resistance & supply/demand). Besides, I use indicators to assist my trading and my favorites are moving averages and RSI.

• Testing
I manually backtest different markets with different range of period. Most of them range from 15-25 years. Ah... This is the most tiring process... I spend min 9 hours a day everyday for almost a year for this! I didn't test it on all commodities/stocks/currencies pairs that I trade. I only tested 35 instruments (include indices, commodities, stocks, currencies) and I conclude that a good strategy should be robust enough to able to trade any liquid markets and I stop testing it. (But I believe traders that implement a very systematic or quant approach should backtest every market they trade, I do not know well about this approach and it's better to leave it to those experts :smart.

• Entry, Stop Loss & Targets
Well, this journal is mainly for recording my journey of this never ending quest! Therefore I won't record all my entries and exits here but I will post a few setups from time to time to discuss with fellow traders.

Hopefully it will be a wonderful journey!
(I might post and ask questions about something others than pure trading, e.g. how traders manage their cash flows, etc. Hope it's allowed here )


Ant

 

[ffsear]

Cool! looking forward to it!

 

[P.I.T.]

Cool! looking forward to it!

Thanks ffsear! You're so fast! :clap:

 

[P.I.T.]

At the time of this writing, I'm having a serious drawdown of 14.23% since March 2014 in my currency trading account and it's my worst month of my life. My backtest results and past trading history have even higher drawdown than this. But the dollar amount lost is quite significant for me (In the past, I've smaller account thus even though at that time I have a higher drawdown than the current one, it's easier for me at that time). It's a 5 figure amount of loss! I've never have such a big loss (in terms of dollars) in my life... It might be small for some traders. But this loss wipe out all my January profits (which is my best month)!

Questions for those that have gone through the same situation:
How do you overcome the emotional side of stuff?

I've trim down my trading activity a lot and stop any research that I've been doing to avoid chasing new system and start this journal to fill my time and keep track of my progress.

On the other hand, I've a much easier time in the stocks market. I'm up a few % so far this year.

 

[Pid]

This is trading unfortunately. you are not doing anything wrong. its all about it making gains, handing them back, making gains and handing them back etc until eventually you are making more than you are losing. And the only way to get past the emotional side of it is......REPETITION. the more you repeat these drawdowns the more emotionally immune you get to it and are able just to execute your strat while having no emotion.

The hardest part for you now is to have enough confidence in your strategy so as to continue executing the signals as you get them. if you only take the losers and miss out on the winners then you will not be able to achieve the results that you expect.

I guess you can see why so many fail. It all comes down to how much pain can you handle and still maintain your discipline. this is a hard hard game indeed.

best of luck

 

[P.I.T.]

This is trading unfortunately. you are not doing anything wrong. its all about it making gains, handing them back, making gains and handing them back etc until eventually you are making more than you are losing. And the only way to get past the emotional side of it is......REPETITION. the more you repeat these drawdowns the more emotionally immune you get to it and are able just to execute your strat while having no emotion.

The hardest part for you now is to have enough confidence in your strategy so as to continue executing the signals as you get them. if you only take the losers and miss out on the winners then you will not be able to achieve the results that you expect.

I guess you can see why so many fail. It all comes down to how much pain can you handle and still maintain your discipline. this is a hard hard game indeed.

best of luck

Thanks for the advise, indeed repetition is the way to get excellence at it, but I really don't want this kind of drawdown happen too often LOL and I guess no traders want it to but it's the nature of this business and it'll surely come again in the future. Trying my best to look beyond the dollars lost and try my best to look it in terms of percentage instead of dollars.

I was meditating today and it feels great Last few weeks I was thinking of adding other method (not trying to fix the current one) for the sake of diversifying but stopped it. Focus on reading books, meditating and relaxing instead of worrying about it.