My Story

Hi all,

This is my story and thoughts, I am not proficient in trading and anything I state is just borne from my own experience and thoughts - I started trading in August 2015, so now I have been trading and learning for about 10 months and still consider myself as a newbie.

From the word go I started with Elliot Wave, no other knowledge or training involved, I took all my signals from EW providers such as EWI, EWT, EWF etc.

I didn't use, and wasn't really aware of, the concepts of money management, trading psychology, financing positions, or much else to do with trading other than how to place trades using UK spreadbetting.

In 6 weeks I went from zero to hero, from a £3.5K starting account to nearly £40K p/l, I wasn't using stops and I was over leveraged across any one of the 50 markets I was trading (£125 pp at one time), also I was over confident and over trading, I was fitting trading in with a full-time job and holidays, much was suffering, I had no spare time as I was watching the markets and losing sleep checking my phone etc. Yet I was winning, I had calculated how long it would take to pay off my mortgage and was heading for the moon :rolleyes:

Then came the mistakes, only 2 trades, the markets changed and I had losing positions, the account went negative and I was adding money from my savings to keep the trades open (using no stops), I was one of the numpties with the illusion that the market would turn in my favour.

I kept this up for 6 weeks before I finally cracked as my funding was too far extended and the financing costs were horrendous, I closed the positions leaving some money in the account to be able to continue trading, but I had lost a good amount of my savings. So now I was on the down coaster and losing more sleep, figuring out how to make up for these losses.

Then guess what - the markets turned in my favour, within a couple of days price was heading towards where my trades were, 2 months later I would have been sitting on the moon :cool:

So one blown account and I embarked on one of the steepest learning curves of my life, not just learning about how to trade like a professional would but how to deal with the psychology of the losses I'd sustained. Luckily it was money I could afford to lose, but massively gutted nonetheless and it will take me a while to reach breakeven now.

I have experienced fear, greed and illusion, 3 deadly enemies of successful traders.

So now I have ditched EW and tried many different methods of trading, I have found (so far) a single consistent technical method to make profits that does not interfere with my lifestyle or work and I can concentrate on it, I have discovered that I am a mechanical trader taking technical signals, no discretion, some finesse and a few rules across a select few instruments, for me it's just a numbers game, the statistics over the long term should bear this out. Combine this with the massive lessons I have learnt in psychology, discipline, consistency and money management, it's early days but I hope I will become one of the 5-10% that stay in the game and be profitable even if not full time.

So my advice to any other newbies is, don't rush in, the markets always have opportunities, they vary from 80% ranging to 20% trending, there will be drawdowns, be in it for the long term and expect to grow your account slowly, take some time to understand yourself as a trader and a style that suits you, there are no shortcuts or holy grails, you will need to learn to lose money and dealing with this is one of the keys to becoming successful, have a plan and stick to your rules, find a way of trading that does not disrupt your life too much, beware of snake oil and don't trade with money you really can't afford to lose. The longer you can stay in the game by using money management, discipline and sorting your psychology, the better the chance you will of finding a way of trading to make you money.

And for me at least, I don't even pretend to understand how the markets work (the professional forecasting services show how difficult that can be), that may come in time, but you need to understand how your trading (and the brokers) works first before attempting to understand how the markets are 'manipulated'.

Cheers !

I wonder are you stock trader or it happened on currency market? What was your leverage?
 
A great story that resonates well with many of us in our early days as traders. Beware of wishful thinking while evaluating a strategy: what appears profitable today might no longer be tomorrow. That's how I started coding my strategies into fully automated bots to run them unoptimized on historical data for many years to see if a strategy really exploits some market inefficiency and can thus be reasonably expected to survive drawdowns in the long run.
 
I wonder are you stock trader or it happened on currency market? What was your leverage?

Across currencies, commodities, metals, indices, softs and grains, leverage was off the scale compared to conventional wisdom and account size.
 
A great story that resonates well with many of us in our early days as traders. Beware of wishful thinking while evaluating a strategy: what appears profitable today might no longer be tomorrow. That's how I started coding my strategies into fully automated bots to run them unoptimized on historical data for many years to see if a strategy really exploits some market inefficiency and can thus be reasonably expected to survive drawdowns in the long run.

What strategy is it?
 
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