Today was one of the worst days I have had since trading full time. ok. It’s only been a week. But still. Doing the math (which on days like today is painful), I only have 194 days like today before I have bankrupted the family. But this comes on the heels of yesterday which was also not a good day. What is happening? I have a trading system (discretionary) that I am supposed to be using. My trading system is supposed to be that I buy stocks that are breaking out of established patterns on high volume, or sell stocks that are breaking down out of established patterns (volume not so important). I am not to sell stocks in a rising market and I am not to buy stocks in a falling market. And as I type this I know exactly what I am doing wrong. The market is open and I get so overwhelmed and afraid of missing a trade that I start guessing. And my favorite front and center guess is that stocks are so oversold that I must not miss the obviously forthcoming violent relief rally. Although it would appear to be obvious to only me. The teeny weeny fish in the great big ocean getting swept away in a sea of just being plain wrong.
This is important to me. I want this to work. And yet I feel myself grasping at trades just to be in the game. I feel like if I don’t make trades I am wasting time. I have read close to 50 books on trading that spell out for me over and over again what the right path is. So why am I doing exactly the opposite. My emotions get in the way; my fear (of being wrong, of missing a trade) and it is costing me money. It is costing me time. Most importantly, it is costing me the greatest opportunity of making a career and a fabulous living doing what I love to do.
I would appear to be learning. Expensive lessons. I don’t think my CFA designation cost as much as I have lost in the past 48 hours. This goal I have set for myself is very important to me and here on this page I will declare that I am going to start respecting it. …more later on how.
As an aside. Much computer issues as of late. Miracle I have been able to trade at all since last night I discovered that my bootcamp XP partition was a paltry 5MG (or whatever, I am not a computer person). As a comparison, my OSX partition – which I do not use – was like, 140MG. So that had to change. But I could not resize the partition without starting from scratch and I spent most of last week downloading much software to get XP up and running. Of course all this downloading caused me to have zero space left and I kept getting messages that “disk space on drive C was dangerously low”.
My Google journeys led me to either Ipartition (what I maybe should have done), or Parallels which lets you run OSX and XP at the same time. This sounded great to me. Mostly because (flash of honesty here) I am a junky for computer hardware/software and mostly am just giantly in adoration of my most awesome trading desk which is 80% aluminum and mostly wire free. At any rate, I degress. Asthetics aside – I love MAC but need XP. So I dropped the $99 for Parallels and after much tinkering and sighing, managed to get it working. But… it did not solve my problem. My partitions were still the same size and all the google searches let me to believe that it was too far over my head to dig in the computer language and fix it myself. And I could not bring myself to spend another $49 on IPartition (sad insert: had I skipped trading today and spent the day having coffee and reading the paper, I could have purchased 40 copies of IPartition. Yikes. But I try not to think of it like this… Can’t or I will go insane(r)).
So I scrapped it all and started all over again. It went seamlessly and now the partitions are split 74/74 and all my redownloading was done by 11am. I think what was happening is I was stressed about the computer and while it was doing it’s thing, I used the back up computer to trade in the investment accounts. Just wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Not focused. Grasping at a bottom when anyone watching the TV, or just breathing could see that no bottom was in sight. Relief rally will come, but I need to learn to wait for it.
I honestly find myself thinking that I will get some kind of gold star (from who?) for buying exactly at the bottom. I can see myself now in a ticker parade, “oh..there she is…invested her entire investment account at the exact 2008 bottom“, …nodding and smiling in admiration of course. Of course.
Well this blog is to be 90% my daily trading diary and 10% (look, I can still add!) a forum for my multiple selves to work out there basic retardness. It has to happen somewhere if this trading project is going to work. And it must. Because it is important to me.
