I got the idea for The Grand Experiment a few weeks before the Las Vegas Seminar. But first some background.
My wife and I moved into our current house in 2003. We bought it from a heroin junkie/importer who was trying to go clean and needed to sell everything. He failed and died in the street out in front of a heroin dealers house in Garden City. Yes, it was a heroin overdose. This happened three months after we bought the house. We had heroin junkies showing up at our house for a couple months after we moved in looking for him to buy dope. Seriously.
Anyway, we started doing a lot of remodeling and landscaping ourselves. This included building two stone retaining walls in the backyard. One is about 120′ long and the other is about 170′ long. Each are about 3′ high. It took 21 cubic yards of top soil to back fill the first one. That construction and a lot of wood working, painting, tile work, etc really took a toll on my wrists and I know have really bad carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists.
Around the middle of this summer I was out edging the yard before I mow (we have about 15k square feet of grass) and I got to the point where I couldn’t even hold the weed eater up with my right hand. It takes about 90 minutes to edge and mow the yard. There’s also an outer perimeter that I mow as a fire break in the event of a wild land fire. Add another 90 minutes for that section. I was having to rest every 10 minutes or so. I had to get my wrist fixed. But I couldn’t do it over the summer since someone has to mow the yard every week and my wife isn’t going to take that chore on.
In trying to figure out when to have the surgery, I chose the Monday after Thanksgiving. I want to get my holiday overtime for Veterans Day and Thanksgiving. Then I can try to make it back to work by Christmas. All three of those holidays fall on my scheduled work days. Since I have about 650 hours of sick time saved up I started thinking, “What a great opportunity.”
After the Las Vegas seminar I knew I had to try this experiment. I got all my doctor appointments in and now have the surgery schedule for November 30. I really won’t be able to do much with my right hand for that first week, but I should be able to use a mouse and hunt-and-peck type with my left hand. At least I hope I can.
That first week will be spent recovering from the surgery and getting set up for trading full time. At least as much as my hand will allow. Basically spending that week doing a dry run for the real test beginning the week of December 7. I will be following my twitter account, working on my watch lists and studying, reading and following those sites that I have been ever since the Las Vegas seminar.
Also, I plan on signing up for the 14-day free trial on Investor’s Underground and following them closely for those 14 days. I’ll be attending their seminars and following their chat room. I wish it was a 30-day trial as that would give me a better look at what I would be getting from them for a monthly subscription fee. I’m not sure their kind of trading is for me right now at my experience level, but the idea here is to try and recreate as best I can the complete trading atmosphere.
Lastly, I will be signing up with The Kirk Report. I joined his site a couple years ago and found it very useful. He has a different style, but that’s good. I’m still looking for my own style and taking advantage of all these successful traders is an important way to put together the best method, or style, for me.
Up to this point my trading has been done at my dining room table on a single lap top. That will change as well. I have a buddy who works for a local IT company here in town and he rebuilds computers that his company tosses in the trash. For $60 he has put together a nice 3.2 GHz machine with an 80 GB harddrive, 2 GB of memory and USB 2.0 for my iPhone. It is going to be set up for dual monitors. During our remodel, we added a LAN system to the house so I will be tied into that if necessary. I’ll have my own printer for this set up (a cheapo that came free with our last Dell purchase). Also in this room is a LCD TV for me to follow news of the day and the overall market. Not sure how important that will be, but I’ve read many times how the overall market can influence many stocks. So, maybe it will be smart to keep an ear open to the rest of the world. We have WiFi in the house and I will also be using my lap top in the event I have to “Take care of some business”, as they say in Las Vegas, while a trade is running.
There is a good chance that I won’t be well enough to return to work by Christmas. The doctor knows that I’m trying to squeeze this surgery in between two holidays. He thinks that if I go back by Christmas I may be feeling some pain and discomfort, but I won’t do any damage to the wrist or set back the surgery. It just depends on how much discomfort I will be in as I won’t be able to take any medication or wear a wrist brace at work. I don’t mind working Christmas really. I’ve pulled guard duty in a foxhole in Grafenwoehr Germany on Christmas, so it’s not all that bad if you’re dry at work and getting paid double-time-and-a-half.
If I get back by Christmas, then this experiment will last three weeks. If I wait till New Years, then I can stretch it out to four weeks. Who knows, maybe I’ll be a total idiot and lose everything and be broke by Christmas. 90% of traders lose money, right? Then again, the idea here it to try out everything I have been learning from various blogs (as listed in the right column on the main page of this blog), the seminars and Tim Sykes’ DVDs. My main goal, believe it or not, is not to make a lot of money. I’m only starting with about $5,400. The idea is to take what I’ve been learning and make good decisions, identify quality stock picks and make winning trades on a consistent basis for these 3 to 4 weeks. If I do that, then I’ll make a little money, but more importantly, I’ll prove to myself that these ideas work and I can apply them successfully.
In the next few weeks leading up to November 30 I’ll be posting about how and why I chose to set up my trading room. I like reading and listening to different trader’s approaches to their environment. I get to hear from them what has worked for them and take a little from each to make my own environment that works best for me. Maybe you’ll see some of their ideas in my set up. I will also finish up my Tim Sykes’ DVDs as well. I have a couple more hours of Penny Stocking Part Duex left as well as all of Tim Fundamentals. My free DVD from the seminar, Tim Tactics, has not arrived yet but I was hoping to watch that as well. Well, maybe I can watch it the week of November 30.
Over the next couple weeks leading up to the surgery, I’m going to be trying to get many last minute projects done around the house. Since I won’t be able to use my right hand much at all, I won’t be able to do any wood working, etc on projects that are still in progress. So those need to be my focus till the surgery. That is also why I haven’t been talking about my trades. I haven’t had any. I just don’t have time to sit in front of the computer right now.
Finally, I don’t think I will be posting a “Trade Recap” every day. I’m just going to play that by ear based on how many trades I make. I plan on doing it every Friday and recapping the week at a minimum. But if I make a lot of trades, maybe I will have to post twice a week. I have never done this so I can’t say exactly.
Where is all this going to take me? Who knows. But I’m really curious to see for myself.