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My journey:
First trade was at 12 years of age was 200 shares of TWA at 15-7/8 with money willed to me. Sold a few years later at 101. I was hooked.
At 16, started managing parent's portfolio.
In college, double major (Accounting and Finance-Securities). Had professor who was an inestment advisor. He taught me options. Life changing.
Tried to get a job at a brokerage but was told I had to work at Sears for two years to learn how to sell things.
Didn't want to work at Sears so became an accountant. Investing stayed a hobby.
Retired from accounting 30 years later. Did some investing but didn't stay very current with investing.
Found a wealth of information on the internet about Futures and Options. Tastytrade has several hours of free training everyday and it is archived.
I started this about two years ago and work at it five or six hours a day with good results.
My father began investing when he was fourteen picking stocks out of the newspaper and charting them by hand on graph paper. When I started at fourteen, I downloaded an app that showed me charts for any of the thousands of traded stocks - innovation!
My journey started with watching my dad manage my Roth IRA as the custodian. While he was always willing to teach, as a teenager I felt that investing/long-term trading was incredibly boring.
I tried to learn how to daytrade from a myriad of 20 something YouTube gurus which, much to my surprise, didn’t result in instantaneous success. In fact, I still haven’t been successful daytrading after nearly three years of working intently!
Where I did began to find success was with systematic trading. After reading every blog post Oddmund Grotte had ever written I built my first system for stocks. It was an extremely simple mean-reversion system that utilized IBS and RSI. I traded it for a few months with great success before the Feb-Mar crash in 2020. Nonetheless I was hooked and continued to test and build trading systems.
In recent months I discovered the universe of literature on growth/momentum trading in stocks - Darvas, O’Neil, Minervini, etc. These idea of cutting losses small and letting winners ride made a lot of sense to me. For the past five months I’ve been practicing this style of trading and have found great preliminary success. It is important to keep in mind that these past few months have been incredible for growth stock trading/investing.
Sorry, I want to elaborate on that original question:
I reaslly learned to trade when I was taught the benefits of trading merchanically. Now, I trade with the same mindset and mechanics for every trade. I follow a system by rote. And yes, options are my bread and butter but even futures are done in the same way. With options it is easier to trade by the numbers because you can go by the percentages of success. The rule of large numbers says that if you make 100 trades, all with a probability of 75%, you can pretty much bet on the fact that that somewhere around 75% (more or less) are going to be winners. You get the same percentages if you are trading futures options, as opposed to futures themselves. It is when I learned to eliminate phrases like, "I heard...", "I think...", and "I read..." from my trading mindset that I really started to win. If I look at my portfolio of open option trades, about a third of them are in companies that I have no idea what they do, but the percentages say that this is a trade with an 76% porbability of success. In short, I know I can trust the numbers one hell of a lot more than some guru saying that he can predict the next Amazon, for a fee of course.
Maybe that isn't when I learned to trade, but it is when I learned to trade successfully.
My father has been trading for a few years. Traded FX when it was more profitable, options, day trading stocks etc. He moved to trading futures about a year ago. Being temporarily displaced from work with the shut downs finally allowed me to sit down and learn.
After buying a new computer and monitors, was in need anyway and my way of restimulating the economy with my stimulus, I loaded up some programs and set up the metrics that he uses. He found out about the Combines, for me as he trades his own money, and we looked at what seemed the best fit and cost for me.
He is in NY and I am in CA so I would shadow trade....sort of...I'd be a little trade happy and take 4x the amount of trades that he did. But being a noob that proved a poor way of trading as he would usually profit much higher than me.
I'm still learning and back to work part time so we don't get as much screen time together as we did during the beginning but it's been good. Still working on the emotional trading vs sticking to my plan. I follow some FB groups and see how what I am taught coincides with other's methods.
There was another thread about the legitimacy of the combines, that I can't post on yet, but they are good for someone like me. No real capital to invest but a monthly fee won't keep food from my family. On the flip side, my father's friend decided to throw his whole Unemployment bulk payment at an account instead of the combine and wiped away more than 10k in just a few short months.
I started in the beginning of my bank career to trade shares and option when i was 20 years old. To be honest, i didn't really know what i am doing.
I quit trading surprisingly without any loss in summary.
Years later, after two leading positions in my bank and being the youngest executive in the history of my bank i was diagnosed with burnout. After sick leave i quit my job, and decided to go to school again (technical school). But my main goal was to learn trading, to live from it and donate an amount of my profits.
3 years gone and i nether can live from it nor am able to donate parts of my profits - because there are none
I started like most of us... looking for indicators, strategies and trading-input from the internet - Paid for shitty courses, holy grail indicators and signal services. I was, and still am, really surprised how much fakers are out there.
But i never gave up and i never traded with real money. And that is something i'm really proud of.
Now i'm feeling that it is reachable to being profitable, just a small amount of time, but still quite a bit of erffort needed.
This is the first forum where i want to take part, and i'm really glad i found it and stick with it.
All the best for everyone of you in our joint adventure!
Can I post here if I didn't learn how to trade?
I got interested in markets after 2008 crisis.
Read tons of literature about economy including Adam Smith.
It was like a hobby.
Then got interested in investing. I was thinking maybe I could make some money in this business.
7-8% annually wasn't enough for me, I didn't have so much money to make a living from it.
So switched to swingtrading. Stocks was an option and I did pretty well. I used Linda Raschke style - daytrading + holding overnight.
1-3 days trades. But greed took place. Again it wasn't enough. So I switched to futures bc leverage much bigger.
Oh boy that was a mistake.
3 years and still struggling. Algo/Discretionary trades/Mechanical entries + discretionary - nothing works for me. Everything returns to mean line.
I think I should stick to stocks and I would be much happier now. Pretty bad.