Keep Calm and Don't Move Your Stops.....

A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning!

The Purpose of Life is Joy!!

Saturday, August 13, 2016

+2%....+4% for the year

Today's post is not really about the trading. I've not had much time for posting the last couple of weeks. I have a "real" job which incidentally I have come to loath with a white hot passion, I am in the final stages of earning my degree which I have no idea what to do with. Plus I am the taxi driver for my kiddo. All this keeps me pretty busy.

But and its a big but......

I am about 2 days from completely burning the real job bridge. I literally hate it. I thought I'd enjoy being back in the mortgage business but truth be told, I hated it from the first day and I've only grown to hate it more each day.

What led me to this decision is this.....the job is sucking the life out of me and I think I'm at a place where I can afford to live on my trading....not because I am a great trader but because I am ready to literally burn the bridge of thinking I am anything other than a trader. I'm ready to own the label. Its been my experience that until you burn the bridge of other options, there is very little success at any of the endeavors you are pursuing. The old Chinese proverb says, "man who chases two rabbits loses both." I'm tired of chasing anything other than excellence in trading.

I have about 16 years until I retire. Two things happened this week that helped push me over the edge.....1. One of my favorite authors has a new book all about finding and creating the life you want and 2. This week I listened to a podcast and a Netflix movie both featuring Tony Robbins. I used to think he was over-hyped, but he said a few things that resonated with me. All this started me thinking about what I could see myself doing for the next 16 years.....and it wasn't mortgage banking, something I'm good at but hate. I went through a mental inventory of all the requirements I have for income producing activities (I refuse to call it a job) and of the 8-10 things I came up with that I require, no single "job) filled all of them but trading came closest to all of them in some way. One of the main requirements I had was that I had to love what I do....and I love trading even though I sometimes hate it!!! So I chatted with my wife and we agreed, so its time to rock and roll

I am under capitalized. I know and understand the issues with this. I fully accept these limitations. I will be trading one or two lots most of the time....and I will trade both CL and ES. ES will be just for scalping, purely mechanical. I have a mechanical system for scalping 1-2 points a day on ES that I developed a long time ago, it still works, I just wanted to learn how to hit the big ones....so I quit the scalping game. Since ES doesn't move that much right now, scalping is fine on this instrument...I can live on scalping proceeds because my needs are fairly small.......and I will wait for the larger moves on CL to build capital and create wealth longer term.


Here are the charts from yesterday. 45ish ticks per lot on CL and 2 points on ES (not shown)

By the way, the yearly totals don't add up from the last post because I've had some wins since then that I didn't post.