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I hate to use the cliche "My Journey"..but I'm not sure what else to call it. I am writing this to give some perspective of what it's been like for me over the past ten years or so. I guess this could also be a cautionary tale.
If someone asked me, even last year, what the biggest mistake I ever made in my life was, I would have to say, "Getting into trading." Having been pretty decent at most jobs or vocations I had, there was nothing that I could imagine doing for five years straight and be a total failure at. Yet, that's what my trading had been..A Failure..an Epic Disaster. So how did I get into this whole quagmire of torment ?
I had been selling Real Estate for several years and had recently enrolled in a local Film School. I went on to make some short films that were in Film festivals and I really enjoyed the creative process. While there, a fellow student convinced me to attend a seminar for a trading software called Forex Made Easy...Ok.. everybody stop laughing now!
I first was exposed to trading/investing when I was a kid, because my father had his own investment business. In our house in Palm beach, he had an office in the 1970's that had the early Trade quote computers. It seemed like I could tell when he was doing poorly because his moods would sour. Later on, through trusting a Bernie Madoff like partner, he lost a tremendous amount of money. So for me, I associated the markets with being an endeavor I wanted no part of.
Yet, there I was, after a 3 hour seminar, shelling out almost $4000.00 for this silly Wizetrade Red light/Green light software. Why? Well, of course the presenter was good at his job and it gave me a dream. Instead of selling Real Estate, I would trade my Forex Made Easy software for two hours a day. I would then spend the rest of my day writing my film scripts and make movies. Did I really investigate what trading was all about? Did I understand the statistics of failure amongst traders? No. I had never failed at anything I put my mind to. I would use the same principles of discipline and hard work that I always did and surely I would succeed at this too? Right?
I had no idea what I was getting into.
End of Part 1
Please let me know if you want me to continue with this little story. Thanks
As you can see from the Wizetrade Chart, it was a system based on green and red Lights on the bottom. The Lights are comprised of various timeframes which you can select and the chart itself is some sort of "proprietary" system of green and red line crosses. In actuality, they were probably some sort of simple moving averages. So I threw myself into their system and started paper trading the currency pairs like Euro/Usd, Pound/yen. and several others.
Probably the worst thing happened to me. I got pretty lucky and won a lot from the very start. I saw no reason to keep doing the sim trading, so I opened an account. I decided to fund my account with about $13,000.00. I graduated quickly from Micro lots..to mini lots ($1 a tick..or what they call Pips) and then to standard lots ($10 a pip).
I used a broker called MB trading and they seemed pretty good, initially.
There was one setup with the charts that seemed to work pretty well. When there was some sort of extreme order flow or a spike, the lines on the chart, in several of the smaller timeframes would shoot straight up (if it was long move) in a totally vertical way. I found a tradeable pattern. I would see the price spike and then a pullback would often happen. Then when there was a crossover on the 1 minute wizetrade chart back in the direction of the spike, I would enter . This was often good for 10 pip scalp. It seemed to work quite a bit.
The other pic I attached is from a journal I was keeping in 2008. It documents my first real trade mishap around New years Day. I had decided to travel to Las Vegas with my girlfriend to ring in the New Year. One of the events I planned was to see the newly reformed Van Halen..with original singer David Lee Roth. Yes, I'm an old timer..haha.
For some reason, the day of my flight, I took a quick trade long on the pound/yen, going in with two standard lots which is $20 a pip. Almost immediately it started diving down and as it approached my 20 tick stoploss, I decided to move it another 20 pips away. I kind of was packing and doing stuff, not overly worried, and peaked back in at the trade. It was about to hit my 40 pip stop and I started getting a little depressed. Did I really want to lose $800 right before I got on a plane to Vegas? No way..so I did something very stupid. I removed the stoploss and moved my target to break even. I went back to packing. I came back 20 minutes later and discovered that MB trading was closed for an early pre holiday trading day. It was Friday and they weren't going to open until Monday. I decided that on Monday, I would call the broker and either throw on a stop loss or exit the trade.
Over the weekend in Vegas I had a good time going out to eat, seeing shows and of course the Van Halen concert. I was a bit disappointed on how badly Roth was butchering the songs. Anyhow........
I call MB trading Monday and received the shock of my life. Somehow the market had gapped down huge! The pound/yen had dropped over 500 ticks! My 12,000$ account was down $10,000.00 . I didn't realize that this was the result of the early part of the financial crisis. If I lost $2000 more, my account would be liquidated. My broker said it was probably just a bizarre move due to some global news over the weekend. He said it's possible it could go back up and over time get me back to even. However, it might move down a bit more. So, I decided to take the chance it would rebound up to my entry. To make sure I didn't get a margin call, I wired in another $8000.00. It would have to crash another 500 pips or so.. for me to lose it Surely that was unlikely, right?
Wrong! It did that in one day. So I lost not only the $12,000.00 I originally had, but also the $8000.00 I had just wired in from Vegas..for a total of $20,000.00 !
So here I am in Vegas, where people lose a fortune gambling at the tables...and I lose 20k by just being an idiot in Forex.
To be continued....