Week 2 summary

Once again, I have been slacking off from posting here. Now, here it is 12:30am on Saturday morning, and I can't seem to sleep, so I figured I would make some good use of my time.

The past two days of trading have kinda, well ... sucked. I was down about $50 net yesterday. That wasn't so bad, but I only traded 4 or 5 times and got in on the wrong side of nearly all the trades. Today was even worse. I got in a total of 8 trades and every single one of them was a loser. I ended up net down $100. You would think that the law of averages would have me at 50% winning, but that is not the case. Far from it! I keep being reminded that this is part of the normal learning process. "Tuition" as my instructor calls it. Well, I call it crap!

Here's the deal, though. Shortly after lunch today, I decided to give up on trading for the rest of the day and observe the market. I wanted to look at a bunch of charts and study some technical indicators and see if I could begin to derive any correlations. My instructor was telling me I needed to be trading more, but I continue to feel like a chicken with it's head cut off. I don't really have a method for farming trades, I have no trading system, and it is driving me nuts! I wanted to spend some time researching something I could use to gain an advantage. And I think I found something!!!!

One of the cool things about working for this company is they have a full time IT staff on site that help with not only software development, support, etc., but on building something they call "tickers". Tickers will show a trader stocks that meet his or her specific entry/exit criteria for a particular trade. Currently, the company has over 600 public tickers to help traders farm trades. They also have 200 private tickers that individual traders have developed with the IT staff, but have not made available to all other traders. While examining many charts for the past couple of days, I think I have come up with a very simple ticker that will help me tremendously. In fact, from my best guess, it looked like it was about 70% successful on the charts I saw. I am anxious to get back to work on Monday and work with the guy who codes the tickers (he was out today). I will definitely update the blog with further developments regarding this.

Honestly, I have always thought my analytical skills have been my strong suit. I like to solve problems by looking at all possible resources to solve the problem, and then methodically derive something that is going to be the best. I realize with the trading profession this may take a long time, but I really and truly believe that I can come up with some type of system that can give me an advantage. I am sure that a lot of people smarter than myself have tried this and failed, so I will have to work hard and, by all means, never give up! Regardless, knowing that I have some type of system in place that I have back tested even minimally will help give me more confidence than shooting in the dark. If not, well, I guess i can always go back to my plan from several days ago .... always do the opposite thing of what I initially want to do! That would have made me some good money today.

Actually, two positive things from the past couple of days:
1. My money management is very good. I don't let trades get out of hand and I hold true to my stops. I have yet to let a trade go past my stop point. I am very disciplined in that regard and feel that I will be 99 times out of 100. Everyone says this is a very necessary quality.
2. Every single one of my trades would have been a winner today had I let them ride until the end of the day. I am becoming more and more assured that I need to be a position trader and not worry about the ups and downs of the intraday market. Although with my new "ticker" system, I think I will have a greater chance of being successful with some of the intraday swings.

So, that was basically it. I still love the job. I like the people who are there. I like the type of work. I love the challenge that is in front of me. And ... quite frankly ... that is one of the reasons I can't go to sleep... my mind is too busy searching for solutions. My instructor warned me about this :-). Tylenol PM may come to be my friend in the coming months. Let's hope not.