This is the start of my trading journal on my road to trading consitency. I have been reading other journals since I joined futures.io and have learned so much from them that I firmly believe that journaling is a vital part of becoming a better and more consistent trader.
My Background
I have been interested in trading for a long time, ever since my University days where, for one of our projects, someone wrote a very basic trading program that interfaced to our local exchange. I was totally enthralled about what this means and the patterns that prices were forming. Very early in my 'day job career' I decided to focus on financial services and spent many years in trade rooms and around trading folk. Forward about 20 years and here we are. This year I decided to take it further and actually start trading for myself.
My day job is .NET developer, the analytical part of breaking a problem apart and constructing a solution for it has always kept me going and always looking forward to the next challenge.
Trading Mindset
When I started to trade earlier this year I very quickly realized that focusing on PnL gets you nowhere very fast. Recently, I went back to the roots of why I feel so excited about trading and realized that the process of trading - entry; exit; risk management; staying in a winning trade for as long as possible; minimizing losses on a losing trade - is what really motivates me and keeps me excited.
So therefore, I will not be focusing on PnL in this journal at all. The core focus will be how I decide to enter a trade and how I manage it through its lifetime.
Trading Strategy
I am a person who likes to keep things as simple as possible in general. This was probably one of the hardest lessons for me to learn to do in my life as I have such an analytical way of thinking :becky:
I was immediately attracted to Price Action Trading because of its relative simplicity compared to other trading methods and have been honing my skills for a couple of months now. I have always felt though that there is something missing with just pure Price Action so have recently started studying the relationship between Price Action and Volume. This is the path I am on right now and discovering amazing things.
I know that this sounds very vague for a strategy but I will be updating this section of this first post as I develop more of a strategy that works for me.
Markets
I mainly trade the ES E-mini Future because of its great liquidity. In the last week I have also started looking at CL but I am still deciding if it is a market that works for me.
Platform and Tools
I use Ninjatrader for all my trading. The platform is very stable and the extensibilty it provides for a .NET developer like me is the best out there.
I develop code to assist me in trading and I will be describing the tools I develop in this journal as I go along. I have learned so much from the excellent code available here on futures.io that it just takes my own code from strength to strength.
Just as an aside, I know that I can probably just download an indicator from the forum for what I am doing, but the process of coding actually teaches me a lot about trading, a process that has worked well for me so far. And who knows, maybe I come up with something that some of you can find value in too and I can give a little back to this amazing community.
I am really excited to share this part of my journey with all of you. My hope is that my journal brings as much value to you the reader as it does to me. I would love feedback on my methods and trading in general, so any comments will be highly appreciated.