27 Nov Guess who’s back!

I’m back!

I’ve neglect­ed this blog for too long. Last post was March 16th, 2018. The rea­son for this was that I want­ed to focus on the actu­al trad­ing than with blog­ging about it. At one point I believe I was more con­cerned with cre­at­ing con­tent than with actu­al­ly improv­ing my trad­ing. How­ev­er, I do see the ben­e­fits of writ­ing about my expe­ri­ences so that I can learn from it and hope­ful­ly share my expe­ri­ence with some of you. Well get on with it then!

Progress

So for the last few months I have been focussing on my trad­ing, but I got­ta say that I didn’t have my “break-through” after I went trav­el­ing for a month and half. “How come?!” I hear you ask­ing, my imag­i­nary friend… Well, let me tell you. Before I went on my trav­els I told myself I would stay dis­ci­plined and fol­low my rou­tine while I was on the go. I had all the right stuff in terms of lap­top, sec­ond mon­i­tor for on-the-go, lap­top stand, the works!… How­ev­er, I mis­judged the impact my trav­els would have. I found myself being tired most of the time because of meet­ing friends and fam­i­ly and kin­da being lived out by social oblig­a­tions. I know now (guess I’ve always known) that I lack the abil­i­ty to say NO. KIDS!! JUST SAY NO TO… well… your friends and fam­i­ly?! That’s right. Although, I don’t regret spend­ing time with friends and fam­i­ly, I do remem­ber feel­ing real­ly bad about it. This was because I told myself I would stay dis­ci­plined and keep doing my work while trav­el­ing. How­ev­er, in the end it all worked out for the best tak­ing some time off and kin­da “reset­ting” myself. More on that later.

ME AGAINST THE WORLD

Great song by the late rap­per Tupac Shakur. Also, a great les­son to keep in mind. When you are on your path to achieve greater things, the peo­ple around you direct­ly or indi­rect­ly work against you. What do I mean by that? Either peo­ple don’t want you to suc­ceed for what­ev­er rea­sons, or peo­ple want to hang out, catch a movie, have that din­ner, etc. Now, I’m not gonna spend any time on the peo­ple that don’t want you to suc­ceed because that’s their prob­lem. The lat­ter is my prob­lem though. There is always that birth­day, din­ner, or what­ev­er lurk­ing around the cor­ner that takes up time you are bet­ter off spend­ing on your craft. As I write this, I feel that there is a ten­den­cy in myself to self-sab­o­tage by engag­ing in these social activ­i­ties. That’s why I am say­ing that it is me, against the world. I need to put myself first before any­one else. They do that too, so why shouldn’t you?

I start­ed a course on over­com­ing self-sab­o­tage by Deb­bie Ford. I’ll write a sep­a­rate arti­cle on that some oth­er time.

Break-through huh?!

Sev­er­al fac­tors went into my so-called break-through.

• Trav­el­ing for a month and half
• Lever­age restric­tions by Euro­pean Secu­ri­ties and Mar­kets Author­i­ty (ESMA)
• Chang­ing to a new broker\

So the trav­el­ing I already explained. Basi­cal­ly, I was away from my day-to-day rou­tines (that prob­a­bly gave me ‘tun­nel-vision’ on day trad­ing). Then the lever­age restric­tions by ESMA made me look for a new bro­ker. By the way, if you don’t know what I am talk­ing about please Google more on the sub­ject. In short, I went from 150:1 lever­age down to 20:1 or 30:1. Doesn’t mat­ter, what mat­ters is it sucked. I could trade way less and had to put up more mar­gin to be able to trade less. It was ridicu­lous. I under­stand why they did it but it didn’t work out for me. So I found a new bro­ker that gave me 500:1 lever­age right off the bat. If you would like to know which bro­ker this is, please com­ment or oth­er­wise get in touch with me.

New bro­ker

Now this new bro­ker only uses Meta­trad­er 4 as their trad­ing plat­form. If you don’t know what MT4 is well… GOOGLE! This meant I had to switch back from my trad­ing soft­ware that I was use (Mar­ketscope 2.0) to MT4 which you might think it’s not a big deal, but oh boy it is! MT4 doesn’t have log­a­rith­mic scal­ing and over­all doesn’t ‘feel smooth’ when using it. So I had to rethink the way I go about trading.

On top of that I felt for quite some time that I might be just mak­ing things dif­fi­cult for myself by only trad­ing based on price action (PA). I had found pat­terns that when using mov­ing aver­ages (MA) they were quite sim­i­lar­ly struc­tured in terms of sup­port and resis­tance lev­els etc. So then I thought why not make things eas­i­er by using an indi­ca­tor to visu­al­ly help me out. So I did. That and 2 oth­er indi­ca­tors I use to trade with and I have seen a huge dif­fer­ence in P/L. Would you like to know which indi­ca­tors these are well you know what to do. Hit me up in the com­ments sec­tion or con­tact me by email.

That’s it for now

I am going to build a track record first and then start increas­ing my posi­tion sizes in accor­dance with my progress and con­sis­ten­cy. More on this later.

Let me know what you think and what things made you look dif­fer­ent­ly to your trad­ing progress and per­haps we can share thoughts. Hit me up in the com­ments sec­tion or by email. Hope to hear from you soon.