So, I’m back at work now full time. Actually, I went back on New Years Day. I’ve been trying to spend my time since then studying up on my notes and information I’ve obtained. I have a lot of information to read too.
So, I started with $10,361.53. My balance ended at $9,446.51. A loss of $915.02, or 8.8%. I made 18 trades and turned a profit on just five of them. That hurts.
What have I learned? Well, a lot. Probably too much to put into a single post, but I’ll talk about some briefly.
First, day trading is a lot of work. Now, it may not be work like building a house, but you spend a lot of time in front of the computer. If you are trying to do your own research, you can add even more time to your daily routine. If you’re trying to blog at the same time, add more time. I put in a lot of hours (I didn’t track these) in over these few weeks and lost money. I have immense respect for those of you out there that day trade and/or do your own research and/or blog and make money. That’s a lot of work and you earn every penny of it. I know because I tried it.
Second, I learned that discipline is a huge aspect to trading. Whether it is day trading or longer term trading. I violated some discipline rules along the way and it caused me losses. It also caused me to miss profits. So, discipline works both ways.
Third, there are a lot of things I need to learn before I can trade more accurately. I need to study up on the seminar information I obtained from Investor’s Underground as well as the tips that members there gave me.
Lastly (maybe), I need to reduce the number of my trades. I don’t think I’m quite ready for 100% day trading. What I mean by that is a day trader may make dozens of trades a day. I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. I think I need to study up and trade slower. I won’t be able to trade everyday due to my work schedule, but when I do trade, I need to limit the number of my trades.
One person I met in IU’s chat only trades one stock at a time. That person doesn’t buy a stock till they trade out of the current stock they are trading. I found it difficult to keep a close eye on multiple stocks when I was trading. Since then I learned more things to watch for on a stock’s behavior and if I have two or three stocks running at the same time, it will be even more difficult to watch them all.
So, I am going to spend the next couple weeks studying and re-working my trading style and my own personal rules. I’ll be getting my proprietory trading firm account set up and I’ll need to learn a new platform as well.
I won’t be posting any more watch lists for a while. I just won’t have the time in the day to do all that research everyday and work. I need to re-focus on work and study up on trading and there just won’t be any time for homework and posting. Once I get caught up with everything, I’ll probably only be trading full time on Mondays. My work week is Tuesday through Friday and I don’t get home from work till around 2:00 am, so there will be no getting up with the markets except on Monday. If I do start posting watch lists, they will be Sunday nights for Monday, but realistically, I doubt I do any more watch lists for some time.
That’s where things stand at the moment. I’ll continue to update this blog as new experiences and trades come along, but they will not be daily posts and I don’t foresee any day trades for a little while.