The balance between trading and the rest of your life

[firewalker99]

I curse my forgetfullness every day - would be more helpful if I actually remembered stuff

The reason I said it is because no-one with any serious money to trade with actually looks at those charts, and so you can imho get caught up with reading far too much into every uptick, downtick and candle pattern on a chart like that.

Say you had a candlestick formation that was meant to be the strongest possible sign of a turn in the market. Say you had all your moving averages crossing juuuuust right. Say you saw the fundamentals were also in alignment with your view, maybe even the market positioning was also favourable.

if you're looking at all this on a five minute chart you might decide that the timing is perfect and you should go long EUR/USD (or whatever) in your maximum size, with a tight stop because i) movements on these 5 min charts aren't huge and ii) because hey, what could possibly go against this perfect setup.

Now say I'm sitting there at the same time and I'm an institutional trader looking to sell 500m EUR/USD. Guess what - I don't care about your 5 min setup - the daily, weekly and hourly charts are all telling me it's a good time to sell, and anyway, liquidity's drying up - it's 16:15 London time and I need to get this trade done today because I have a massive European pension fund that's got a large buy program of U.S. equities and I need the dough in dollars. I'm selling now - end of story.

It's like thinking that the skipper of a supertanker is worried about every bit of swell over 6 feet in the ocean - if you're on a rubber dinghy you get tossed about but up on the deck of your supertanker it doesn't even spill your coffee.

Just my $0.02 as always

GJ

All very true, but that's also exactly the reason why big players will never reach the same astonishing % returns as some traders playing on smaller timeframes do.

 

[Kevin21]

i may well be getting the girl back. Her best mate told me she's gonna ring me in the week, so we'll see what happens.
I've got my pot up to a nice and healthy size now, a couple of more weeks of hitting it hard then i'm gonna do down to just taking 200pts a day but with higher value contracts. I should have more time to myself then, and hopefully i've got the girl in the bag too. Plus my ETA on getting my new motor is around two months i recon If all goes well that is....

 

[SCFX]

one thing really annoys about the life style of trading all the time is the fact that i'm just sat at a desk all day. I'm quite a fit person, well not as fit as i was 6 months ago, but at the moment i don't have any time to go running, cycling or to the gym. At one point i was considering joining the marines as an officer, and around that point i was running nine miles in an hour flat and had 11% body fat. I used to be able to do around 17 lateral pull ups a couple of months ago. The other day i could only do 8 I want to free up time to get my fitness back up...[/QUOTE

I have been working flat out for a few years on my trading and am now out the otherside where i believe i am a 'professional' trader. i did the 16 hr days over and over and over again... BUT.. when it came to weekends i would party my ass off, sometimes have a little fun with a girl before working my ass off the following week again, going throught the same cycle of 16 hr days... i had little room for serious relationships.

This is all good as i had my 'escape' form trading during the weekends. What i really want to say is that during the week i was down the gym 3 or 4 times, it was my only break from trading for those 5 days and a healthy one. No drinking, smoking or whatever else one might take but just work and gym 5 days a week. This i was happy with as i was living my dream and learning to become what i wanted to do for a rewarding living.

So perhaps you could manage to break your life into different modes as i did... why not do this for a few years.... oohh and please make sure u have someone who knows how to trade teach you, direct you, mentor you... otherwise you're in for a hard time and unlikely to come out the otherside even after a few years...

Cheers Charlie

 

[Kevin21]

Just an update... got the girl back.