Back to the drawing board

I know .. I know ... where is the rest of my story? It will have to wait. I don't have the ambition to finish it, but one of these days I will get around to it. I promise. Until then, you will just have to hear about another day at my new job.

Actually, it was a little boring today. The instructor for our group is out of town, so we were kind of left on our own. A few people came in to talk to us about commissions, software architecture, and other things. They were pretty boring. We mainly got to spend a lot of time trading today (still our fake account).

I had my shirt taken from me in the morning. I try to use technical analysis on 3 minute charts and I am getting slaughtered. I was down about $200 within the first 30 minutes of trading. Thank goodness this is still trading on a fake account. I think tomorrow I am going to try two things. One, I am going to change the 3 minute charts to 1 minute charts and see if I can do any better. Things just happen so fast at the open, I can't keep up. I am like a deer in the headlights. I know I will get better with that over time. The other thing I am thinking about is just making the exact opposite play as what my intuition is telling me. Obviously, if I am losing that much that fast, I am doing something seriously wrong. So whenever I think I should buy, I should just try the exact opposite approach. That is going to take some mind training to do, but I will see if I can do it. Actually, I should only try one of the two approaches tomorrow and see if that works rather than trying two different things and having the combination still not work.

I talked a little more with my coach. He had a very good trading day today. He was up over $5K at the end of the day. That is great because I know he was net negative all of last week. This whole trading thing is kind of crazy -the fact that you can ride a rollercoaster like that. It will probably shave years off my life, but I once again, I am willing to see if, in fact, I may experience less stress than my previous job. I have said this all along ... at least I am in control. I pull the trigger for the buy or the sell and I only have myself to blame for failure. Meanwhile I have a lot of traders there to teach me and give me guidance. This is a lot different than having to report the same status to 4 different people (as mentioned in a friend's/former co-worker's blog). I truly feel like even though I am not successful at trading now, I am learning things that will help me and make me better, and that is something I have not felt on a regular basis for a long time. I love it.

Oh, by the way, in afternoon trading, I gained back $150 fake dollars to only be down $50 net on the day. Not too bad I suppose. Now if only I can get the 10 o'clock bulls figured out.