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Exited my TOPIX Bullx2 ETF (1568.T) trade this morning 20 minutes after the open at 21400 yen. With commissions, I made 1000 yen or $10 on the trade. I am very happy, as this trade went bad from the start.
Not a beautiful trade, but it's points on the board.
Analysis. I give myself a mixed score, maybe a C or C-
Positive:
1. had a trading plan
2. good execution
3. researched and developed a swing trade idea
Negative:
4. broke my rule on no-ULTRAs: greed
5. broke my rule on no trading first 30 minutes: fear and impatience
6. didn't have the setup written down, kept it in my head: laziness
Looking at point #6, when it came to make the exit, I am fumbling around trying to remember the BE number and the target. Ummmmm. It's just like they say, when you get in the middle of the trade, your IQ suddenly drops, and if you don't have the trading plan written down and right in front of you, you are going to fumbling around.
Maybe I should actually have the trading plan printed out.
Grateful for:
Healthy, thriving family
Healthy & mostly sane myself
Support from many new friends
And love from many old ones
Loyal clients for many years
Critics and detractors to keep me on my toes
Many high class problems &
Few low class problems
On Money & trading:
Didn't blow up
Early losses had positive takeaway
Found motivation to buckle down
Newfound positive attitude
Determination
"If we don't loosen up some money, this sucker is going down." -GW Bush, 2008
“Lack of proof that something is true does not prove that it is not true - when you want to believe.” -Humpty Dumpty, 2014
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Prof. Albert Bartlett
Thanks for those pictures. Kinda hard to imagine that, walking down Sixth Ave. today.
People had the idea that the steel had been shipped to Japan, turned into bombs, then dropped on American heads. I guess that must have been a hot topic of the day.
I don't think it's just the writing of the journal, it's also drilling down deep into this forum and also watching tons of videos on Youtube -- it's having a real effect on my attitude toward the market. A wonderful, calming effect on my agitated mind.
When I came in here a month ago I was in a panicked/frustrated state of mind that this great bull market was happening and that I was missing out on it -- and on top of it blowing up my account in spite of the bull market. Doubly confused and insulted by the irony of it.
By now I have calmed down. I'm not watching the financial news and I don't give a rats ass about where the market goes. It goes up I am going to make money, it goes down I make money. Up and down, buy and sell, buy and sell, buy and sell. That's what we do.
I am going to get back to trading real money when I am good and ready .
When does something stop being a trade and become an "investment"?
This is what I keep asking myself with respect to my USLV position.
Now that I have taken 80% of my funds and locked them up in my investment portfolio, the remainder, all of my trading capital is tied up in USLV. And it looks like I may be holding onto this for a while.
Last week the trade was down by 46%, and it's come back up to 38% down. I got so depressed about it last week that I could not even write in this diary. But I must stick it out. The diary is the key to everything.
1. Set up limited partnership for my funds, start my investment program (ETF rotation strategy), set up trust for kids.
2. Read one book or watch one video or webinar per week on trading
3. Maintain this diary with a least one post per week and up my futures.io (formerly BMT) membership to elite.
4. Take at least one active step on changing my money psychology (NLP, etc.)
5. Continue practicing swing trades with live money, only lower trade size to level where losses or gains do not affect me emotionally.
6. Implement futures.io (formerly BMT) trading diary spreadsheet for all my trades.
7. Take one course with some trading guru or program (now leaning toward tradingbook.com)
8. Learn one program like MotiveWave, etc., inside and out
9. Patiently, patiently wait for my USLV long trade to turn profitable, and in the meanwhile take away as much as possible from this very painful experience.
10. Track progress on these goals in OmniFocus, post followup evaluation here at end of 2014.
Usually, when I meet some new expat here in Japan who doesn't know the language at all, I offer my list of five most commony used expressions. It's an 80/20 thing. Master these, and you've got 80% of discourse covered (almost). (the list includes sugoi, omoshiroi, oishii, arigatoh, and ganbaru).
The last one on the list, "ganbaru," is used by everybody all day long. It's used to season speech the way a chef uses salt in the kitchen. Translated various ways, my best parse on it in some situations would be "hang tough".
So that's were I am, going into 2014.
Hanging tough.
This is today's theme because I got my ass majorly kicked in the Forex market yesterday, not by actively trading but by just being positioned in the yen. It's really dispiriting. Even if I don't put on my trading hat I am still implicated in a trade, just by having assets. I guess that's the takeaway. Just because you are not sitting down at the trading station trading tick by tick does not mean you don't have a trade on. It's just a matter of time frame.
Anyway, I am hanging tough. And slowly pulling my head out of my ass.
I have a whole bunch of technical issues that I am working away at. This is made complicated and difficult by the fact that I am here in Japan and everything Japanese is needlessly complicated. That's the way they like it.
Then there are the psychological issues. I have decided to prioritize "moving the needle" on my money psychology.
In my massive trading ebooks collection I discovered i had this little gem of a book:
The Secrets To: Emotion Free Trading
“How To Consistently Act In Your Own Best Interest With Your Off-The-Floor Trading!” By Larry Levin
Just starting to read it. Perhaps I should write a book review for this journal. That will give me the motivation to read it more systematically.
Anyway, the final chapters of the book lay out a practical course of action for changing your trading psychology using Psycho-cybernetics, which, according to Wikipedia, "combines the cognitive behavioral technique of teaching an individual how to regulate self-concept developed by Prescott Lecky with the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann."
Ok, so I think this is what we know nowadays as the practice of "visualization." Or in Japanese what is called "image training." Athletes do it. It apparently works.
Right off the bat, I can say that a big part of my money psychology involves constant negative visualization of failure and bad outcomes. And this is incorporated into my trading. There is a failure script burned into my head that I am constantly fighting against.