This trading journal will be quite sparse. Due to my job I am only able to trade the live market during RTH on a bi-monthly basis.
The rest of the time I study and read, so this journal will be the place where I will collate my thoughts on the market and of course myself, perhaps in diary fashion. In doing so I am hoping to discover my trading self.
I don't expect anybody to read my journal, really I don't. I bring nothing to the table as far as expertise in trading goes, because quite frankly, I have very little.
Nonetheless, a brief background on my trading history and even a little about me.
My background is Plant Layout & Piping Design. The oil & gas sector has been my playground since 1993 and I have been very fortunate in that it pays extremley well. And then September 2008 happened.
To cut a long story short, I managed to keep my job until December 2009 and then that was it. For the first time since 1993 I didn't have a job. What would I do?
The answer to that question was easy. Why, I am going to become a day trader.
Of course we all know what happened next but here is a quick timeline. I started trading in January 2010. I joined a subscription service that emailed day trades to place during the RTH. I read. I read. I read. I joined chat rooms. I paid vendors big dollars for holy grail indicators. I read. I studied. I read. I read. What could go wrong?
I will not bore you. I never quite blew my account but I came very close. By a stroke of good fortune I got a job offer in September 2010 that got me back into engineering. If that had not happened, I don't know where I would be.
However, that gave me a chance to level out, dust myself off and ask the question, what the hell happened? The answer to that was easy, "me" happened.
It was me who paid the vendors thousands of dollars; they didn't come into my house, log on to my computer and use my credit card. It may have felt like it at the time though!
It was me who joined the chat rooms; I wasn't forced into blindly entering the called trades.
It was me who entered the trades that I subscribed to; what is wrong with an 8 point stop anyway?
I know this is said time and time again, but it really is YOU who is in control of your account and your trading. It took me stepping away for many months to realise this. Trading still fascinated me, but what could I do to help myself?
My first step was to join this forum. I won't wax lyrical but this is a superb platform for everything trading.
The second was to stop relying on indicators and start relying on myself. I always had a hard time with indicators. I was convinced when I spent thousands on an indicator package that I had something nobody else did, an edge. That "egde" however was blunt.
So I stripped my charts and started reading about Price Action. I want the market to tell me what it is going to do. Hence, here I am today.
Please note I am NOT an experienced trader, so if I show charts in this journal I will show what I see on them, not what the correct thing to do is.