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, February 22, 2020

Time sure does fly

I noticed today I haven't posted in three months. A lot has happened in that time frame but for trading purposes, I didn't start trading again until around January 15th.

Over the holidays I did a lot of thinking about life, where I am and where I want to go. I came to the realization that in my remaining years, I only want to do what makes me happy. Life is to short to choose otherwise!

I decided that what I really want is complete freedom to do what I want, when I want and for my own reasons. Being tied to a job does not make that happen and so I decided to get serious about growing my trading account to the point where I can rely on it for income vs a job.

The plan was to grow the account to a certain size over the course of a month or so and then use that as the starting point for the plan. That happened and so this month about a week ago, I hit that goal and then began working toward freedom. First thing that happened was balances started going down nearly immediately. I sort of expected this but I don't really care. I am on a journey and delays and detours are to be expected.

I have about 90 minutes each morning to trade. I can realistically trade until around 7:30 AM my time most days. Since the market opens at 7 AM my time, that means I can get the open if needed. I find this 90 minutes is about all I really need if I am patient and allow the market to come to me. 30-50 ticks are generally available most mornings within the parameters of how I see the market so my daily goal is roughly 30 ticks on average. Some days there will be more and some days less but overall 25-30 ticks per contract is my rough goal.

I don't have time to post every day but I will try to post once a week either Friday night or Saturday morning. I want to document the journey and this is my only real place to do that.

So in the interest of small beginnings, here is the first weekly progress chart and a mark up from Friday's trades. The Journey to Freedom graph is simply a running balance starting from zero where zero represents my starting balance in the account as of a week ago. I don't trade every day so the Day axis represents days I actually trade, not calendar days.

Charts are from TradingView.com as I like their drawing tools very much. However, my broker no longer connects to their charts so its just for review mark ups these days.

On another note, my average time in trade used to be about 4 minutes. Now my average time in losing trades is about 10 minutes and my average time in winning trades is about 43 minutes. Same is true of my average win size and average losing size in terms of dollars. Average winning trade is three times as large as my losing trades. I'm pretty happy with these numbers and I think if I can maintain this over time, I should be good.

Initial size is always 1 or 2 lots for now. Will consider adding as balances grow. I have done fairly well with this over the last few months and I know adding to much size to quickly can mess with your head so for now, I am content in this range. I think adding a 3rd lot to a winning trade might be in the works within a few weeks but I will only do so when it seems the most obvious thing to do.

Have a great weekend!