Filter_Sweep’s Hong Kong Journal

[filter_sweep]

Purpose of journal:
- Increase motivation & accountability for doing the “right things,” even it decreases my profitability for a given trading session, as my focus is on long-term skill development and not on short-term profits

What I plan to share:
- Session results, discussion of things I did & didn’t do well, and enough about my methodology to put the discussions in context

What I don’t plan to share:
- Every detail of my setups and how I manage them, although I’m sure over time these things will become obvious as I discuss how I entered & managed certain trades. My initial concern is that I trade thin markets (Hong Kong futures) and I don’t want any increased competition for liquidity at my desired entry and exit levels. Of course this will only be an issue if I demonstrate consistent profitability, but I believe it to be a valid concern nonetheless.

What I invite:
- Constructive criticisms, although whether I take your advice will depend on how good it is and if it’s aligned with my market paradigm
- Encouragement and support
- Call me out if I do stupid things, see “Purpose of journal” above

What I don’t invite:
- Endless Q&A on the Asian futures markets themselves. If you’re too lazy to use the search function, Google, or research IB’s website for margins, commissions, hours, volume/liquidity, rollovers, etc. for Asian exchanges and their products then you probably don’t have what it takes to trade these products anyway
- Flaming, nay-saying, off-topic rants, and all the other things that make journals less interesting

What I trade:
- HKFE products, including HSI, HHI, and MHI (mini HSI). Right now I mainly trade MHI, with an occasional HHI trade. In the near future HHI will become my main product, and eventually I plan to trade both HHI and HSI. For a description of why I’ve forced myself to trade MHI for a season, see my next few posts which will cover my trading history and where I am in my journey

When I trade:
- Monday through Thursday nights, HK morning session only (currently 8:45pm to 11:30pm Central time). On most nights I’m done by 10:30pm, as it tends to quiet down during the last hour before the lunch break. I don’t trade Sunday nights and I don’t trade HK afternoon sessions (1:30am to 3:15am)
- Why do I limit myself to trading these hours?
o I have a good-paying day-job that allows my family (wife + 2 small kids + dog) to live comfortably; living in Texas makes that even easier with low living expenses (FYI, I’m a manager in the IT compliance field). My wife doesn’t work, and with a degree in Psychology she wouldn’t make enough for it to be worth it anyway. Plus I like her at home raising our kids the way we want to raise them. My job has lots of potential for increased advancement and pay… I’m very good at what I do and I’ve been well-liked and on the ‘fast-track’ everywhere I’ve worked. I’m 33 years old and I’m at a sweet spot in my career with about 9 years experience in my field. My point of all this is that my day-job is not something I’m willing to walk away from until I have the proper skills and capitalization to make trading a high-probability full-time venture, and not have to compromise my family’s lifestyle substantially. Make no mistake about it though, trading is my primary passion in life, has been for several years now, which is why I actively trade outside of US hours. I’ve switched between various Asian and European markets over the past few years, but have found the Hong Kong market hours (and volatility) to work the best with my work schedule and not impair my ability to be alert and 100% effective when I’m at work.
- I usually work from home on Fridays and will occasionally trade US markets these days. This is sometimes against my better judgment though… I got my head handed to me on a plate in early April when I tried trading CL for the first time. If I do trade US markets I try to stick to equity index futures like ES and NQ

Trading Style:
- Price action, currently use 8 setups, although 3 contribute to 80% of the trades
- Scalps & intra-day swings
- Trend & counter-trend
- I believe strongly in “situational probabilities,” meaning no setup inherently has an edge; it’s all about knowing when to use it (you are the edge)

The next few posts will recount how I got here.

 

[filter_sweep]

The following is an overview of my trading journey to date:

2004

I became aware of trading for the first time. I saw a WizeTrade software infomercial on a Saturday afternoon, and I suddenly realized that I knew nothing about the markets, but I was very intrigued and a vacuum was created in my mind that I had to fill. I spent several months studying what I could find on the internet, read a couple of really bad books (trading is easy, come on in, the water’s warm!), and eventually around late summer fell for a sales pitch for a overpriced software package called “Gecko Trade” or something like that. I think they were based out of Australia. The software used a combination of MACD, RSI, and moving average crossovers to spit out stock trade recommendations on a nightly basis (on top of the $4k software fee, which was supposedly ½ off the normal price, you also had to pay $50/month to download their data). It sounded good though because I could submit my buy-on-open trades each night and not have to worry about them during the day. Not having much money to trade with, I took out $30k of cash from some credit cards and opened an Interactive Brokers account. After paper trading the recommendations for a couple of weeks, I jumped into the deep end and started buying stocks. I did somewhat decently for a couple months, because the market was in a gentle uptrend that fall, and my double-down tactics on my low-performers worked well in that environment.

I started noticing something strange though. I found that my buy-on-open orders would generally spend the whole day underwater on the day of entry, and this puzzled me. I pulled up intra-day charts on my stocks, and I noticed that the first trade of the day tended to be very high, a gap up from the previous day, and then the stock would come down quickly in a matter of minutes. That’s when it occurred to me that there were probably hundreds of people out there using the same software to pick the same thin stocks to buy and sell on the same days, and we were all entering and exiting on market-open orders, so the specialists were raping us. I was working from home one day, so I decided that instead of entering on a market-open order, I would wait for the stock to open, and then enter after price came down and settled.

And that was the moment… the first time I saw an instrument trade tick by tick in real-time. I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was instantly transfixed by the movement on my screen, I felt very privileged to be witnessing what I was seeing… here before my eyes was the real time buying and selling of a stock, price-discovery so to speak, the eventual negotiation of which would be reported in tomorrow’s newspaper. I was seeing tomorrow’s news in real time today, and I could participate in this negotiation! I bought my stock at a lower price than the open, and for a moment I felt like I’d outsmarted the market. It was a great feeling.

Instantly hooked, I wanted to participate more in this intra-day action. I was able to work from home a lot that fall, and after trying to figure out how to day trade the S&P 500, I learned about ES. I had a similar experience to the one described above when I first witnessed the ES Depth of Market trade… watching the orders flow in and out of the DOM was intoxicating… to think that everyone in the world that wanted to trade this thing had to go through this order book, the one I could see in real-time, was fascinating. After watching the ES trade for several days I eventually mustered up the courage to place a trade myself. I had just finishing reading “Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets” and decided to enter on pullbacks to a trend line. Stops and targets weren’t part of my trading plan yet though. I think I exited with 2 ticks of profit on my first trade, and I somehow considered that to be a success. I placed a few more ES trades over the next couple of weeks, and started getting into the habit of doubling down on losers to exit on breakeven (after all, it was working on my stock trades!). At this point I was up about $1500 on my stock swing trades and up maybe $300 on my ES trades. I felt like I was on top of the world.

Then came 12/31/04, and I had the day off work, so I decided to trade. I believe the morning was pretty quiet, I think I had one breakeven trade. Then shortly after lunch the market shot up several points, a pretty big move for those days. I was pissed that I wasn’t long. A pullback formed, and I debated entering a trade, but didn’t have the courage to do so. Then the market shot up again, and I got even more pissed. I told myself when the market made another pullback, I would get in and not exit until it shot up a 3rd time. I entered a contract on the next pullback, but the market vacillated for what seemed like an eternity, then started moving down, slowly at first. I averaged in, then averaged in again. The pace at which the market started falling started to increase, and I started to worry. I averaged in several more times, thinking surely the market would come back up and get me out at break even, and then my orders started getting rejected because I was out of margin. I watched it go down several more points, and then I capitulated and exited all of my contracts. I swear I was the lowest print, because it seemed like the second after I capitulated, the market shot back up and well exceeded my break-even point while I sat there watching in disbelief. I lost close to $2k on that trade, all my profits from when I started trading, and I was trading purely on credit (up to that point the possibility of losing money didn’t really occur to me). I was shaken up and disgusted with myself, so when the markets reopened after New Years I closed all my open stock positions, closed my IB account, paid back my credit cards, stopped my Go Gecko data feed subscription, and proclaimed that I was done trading.

 

[filter_sweep]

2005

It was a good thing I quit trading, because I got promoted at work and the new responsibilities took away a lot of the free time I would have had. However, a seed had been planted, and I continued to keep tabs on the market, looking at charts, applying some crude technical analysis and being more active in my 401k management.

2006

I left the company I was with to take another job, and one of the first things I did was roll over my modest 401k into an IRA with Scottrade so I could actively manage it. I didn’t move it to IB because I knew I wouldn’t meet the activity minimums. Even though I had big ambitions, I wasn’t a very active trader… I always found it hard to pull the trigger. The trades I did make were managed very poorly. I remember one ILF trade that I saw go up like 30%, then come back down to around breakeven, which is when I exited, only to see it go back up and far exceed its previous high. I mostly held long-term positions in a few ETF’s and stocks, but since half of my account stayed in cash, I missed out on a lot of appreciation during the slow grinding uptrend back then. I was definitely underperforming the market.


2007

I’m not sure how, but somehow I got turned on to options. I had previously read a book on options by Tony Saliba, a market wizard, but that was back in 2004. Somehow I heard about selling credit spreads, and it was billed as an easy way to make a monthly profit. Since my stock trading wasn’t going very well (I knew I didn’t have an edge), I thought that if I could understand options, then maybe I could find an edge and eventually make enough money so I could start day trading, which is what I really wanted to do . I proceeded to spend every waking moment studying and analyzing option combinations, looking for an edge. I dumped hundreds and hundreds of hours into this research. No matter how hard I studied though, I could never find an options combination that had high probability, high profitability, and low risk. Again, I mistakenly thought that a certain options combination would inherently give me an edge, and I would never have to have an opinion on direction. I was obviously very wrong, but didn’t know it at the time. However, I was having a hard time finding the Holy Grail on my own, so I decided to turn to the newsletter vendors. There were a lot of snake oil salesmen out there at the time saying how easy it was to make money selling premium, and I got sucked in because it seemed so easy. A few were just blindly selling iron condors every month, risking a dollar to make a dime. I later learned that these vendors never had to show their losses because they would just roll them over to the next month and consider it to be the same trade. Their track records always looked very impressive. I eventually decided to go with a newsletter vendor that appeared to be more diversified than most, because they sold spreads and condors on individual stocks and ETF’s. Like most, they had a great track record, showing an average of 10% profit per month. In June of ’07 I transferred my IRA from Scottrade to ThinkorSwim so this newsletter vendor could auto trade a portion of my account. The first month went well, as we were in a gentle uptrend at the time and we were short bear put spreads. I decided to up my allocation for the next month. Of course, late summer of ’07 is when the wheels started coming off the multi-year bull market. I was short volatility and the unrealized losses started to mount. At the end of the month, the newsletter vendor decided to roll all their losing spreads down and out and sell some call spreads to try and make back the losses, but it didn’t work, because the volatility kept expanding. By the September I had lost somewhere close to 40 percent of my account, and the newsletter vendor wanted to roll out the spreads again. I wasn’t about to lose any more on a trade I didn’t believe in, so I pulled the plug, cancelled my newsletter subscription and closed the remaining open spreads myself.

Having learned a very painful lesson, I humbly came to the realization that no matter what you trade, you eventually have to make a call on the direction of something (price, volatility, etc.). I really wanted to day trade, but wasn’t sure I could do it. I studied market movements daily by pulling up intraday charts on stocks and futures, and even purchased a couple low cost systems that were helpful in my quest for an edge. I had read at least 20 books on trading at this point, and had spent a few hundred hours back testing different methodologies trying to find an edge. I knew that I’d have to trade in real time to learn, even if it meant just paper trading at first, but holding down a day job didn’t give me the opportunity to do that. Or so I thought.

I don’t remember how it happened (probably surfing on ET), but somehow I became aware of the Asian futures markets accessible through Interactive Brokers. After a lot of research, I decided to trade the mini Nikkei on the Osaka exchange in the fall of 2007, but after trading that slow-mover for a couple of break-even months I switched to Taiwan (STW) on the SGX exchange, which better fit my schedule since it opened an hour later and didn’t close for lunch. I shudder a bit when thinking about my primitive trading methodology back then, but it was effective enough to keep me from losing a lot of money and it got me involved and exposed to what it’s like to put your capital at risk. And most importantly, I was finally day trading on a consistent basis, which is what I had wanted to do since first seeing price trade intraday back in 2004.

 

[filter_sweep]

2008

I hit my stride in January and February, which were both good months profit-wise. I was starting to refine my methodology for the Taiwan contract, which, strangely enough, was based largely on buying/selling pullbacks to trend lines (similar to my initial experimentations with ES back in 2004). I made money every night that I traded in February, and I started getting cocky and loose. I wasn’t making tons of money, I probably only averaged $80 a night, but I was feeling good. When I fired up my trading computer the evening of March 3, I was excited about the new month, and was thinking about scaling up. My first trade of the evening was a loser, which got me a little frustrated. My second trade, which had me short, didn’t work out either, but instead of stopping out like I normally did, I cancelled my stop order and told myself I’d add another contract and exit at breakeven. The market shot up a little stronger than expected, so when it paused I mindlessly added a couple more contracts to improve my average price, thinking we’d surely seen the high of the day. We hadn’t. The market kept going up and up, and I kept throwing contracts at it, not even waiting for it to pause. Any semblance of strategy had long been thrown out the window… I was trading purely on revenge, stress and panic, trying to dig myself out of a hole at the worst possible time. I had never seen STW move so far so fast. I later found out that the Taiwanese elections were going on at that time, and some very important news had come out about a pro-business candidate. Regardless of the news, I was fading a ridiculously strong move, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked at my unrealized losses. Ultimately price stopped jamming higher for a period, right about the time I ran out of margin. As price started pulling back, I started scaling out slowly. I needed almost a 50% retracement to get out at breakeven, and I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I exited the majority of my position when price briefly touched the EMA I was watching, and capitulated the rest as price retested the highs. It’s a good thing I did, because after a brief pause, price kept jamming higher and higher, but I was too shell-shocked to participate in the up move. I had lost about 25% of my account, which felt like a massive blow at the time, since I had just recently suffered the 40% drawdown back in late summer of ’07 from selling option premium. However this trade was one that I initiated, and I’m the one who averaged in on the way up. If I hadn’t exited when I did I would have lost well over 50% of my account. I’m guessing IB’s maintenance margin calculations would have exited my position for me at some point.

I took a week or so off, and realizing I had made a massive mistake, vowed to never “add to a loser” again. I can honestly say that I’ve never made that mistake again, although I’ve since made many other mistakes which have resulted in significant losses, but nothing even close to that type of percentage loss on one trade. That was my blow-out experience, and I learned from the tuition.

I spent the rest of 2008 making back the money I lost on that trade. I quickly grew tired of my trend line based strategy, as I believed there had to be a better way to trade. After studying Fibonacci retracements for a while, I developed a trend following scale-in / scale-out methodology for entering pullbacks on trends that showed promise. The risk : reward of this method was very poor, but it had incredibly high probability of profitability, so it was both emotionally appealing and somewhat profitable to trade this way. After working out the kinks and suffering a few significant losses, I was back on the road to consistent profitability. It was a “two steps forward, one step back” way of trading, as I would go several weeks making $100 a night, and then lose $900 on one trade. However, overall it was profitable, and still is, just take a look at the “Only Way to Trade Fibonacci’s Journal” which shares some similar elements to the strategy I was using, although I traded the technique somewhat differently. I absolutely hated losses, so I kept refining the types of pullbacks I would fade, and kept improving my win percentage. I eventually became very enamored with a very specific permutation of the setup which had an incredibly high rate of success, and I slowly evolved to the point where I was only trading that setup. Since the volatility kept expanding throughout 2008, and there was so much movement, I would see this setup form 2-3 times a day, and after commissions would make $45 each trade (5 ticks). When I think back to all the opportunities that existed during 2008, it pains me to think that I limited myself to such an obscure setup with such small profits, but that’s where I was in my evolution as a trader at that time. I think my big blow-up on March 3rd took a long time to get over, so I constructed a trading methodology that focused on not losing, as opposed to winning.

By the end of 2008, I made back all my losses from the March 3 debacle. I was feeling good, but growing concerned as well. By December of 2008 the volatility had been completely sucked out of Taiwan, which had fallen much farther and faster than the US equity markets. During the fall it was not uncommon to see 100 tick intraday moves; by December we were lucky to see 25 tick ranges, many days were 15-20 ticks at best. The value of the contract had been cut by almost 2/3, and it started to resemble a ghost town. Whereas I used to see my precious setup occur 2-3 times a day, it would now only show up once or twice a week. Sitting in front of my monitors for 5 hours without making a trade got old real quick. To make matters work, getting 5 ticks of profit out of the setup when it did occur became rarer, and I would frequently have my target hit but not get filled because price could no longer push through the level. December was my first losing month since March.

 

[filter_sweep]

2009

After suffering some more frustration and losses in January, I realized that Taiwan was done as an instrument. I either had to figure out another way to trade, or find another market. I considered switching over to Hong Kong and trading the Heng Seng, but I was scared of that market at the time because of its size and volatility. The strategy I was trading at the time would have me occasionally take large losses, which I could stomach on STW, but HSI was much bigger and I was not willing to take such large losses, even if they occurred only rarely. I knew that anything could happen at any time, and eventually I would suffer two big losses in a row, and I was not prepared to do that with such a volatile contract.

After a lot of deliberation and research I decided to switch over to Europe and trade the Euro STOXX 50. Its size and movement was much more familiar and comfortable to me, and it respected fib levels in a very similar way to STW. To make things better, Europe, like the US, was still very volatile in early 2009. It was clearly a better market to trade than Asia, so I knew what I had to do. Convincing my wife to accept my new trading hours was difficult, but she eventually supported me in my decision. I got up every morning, Monday through Friday, at 2am and traded until about 6:30am, after which I would shower, get dressed, and go to work until about 6pm. The hours at work between 2pm and 5pm were the worst for me, it was very hard to focus and be productive. I was in a client-serving consulting position at the time, so looking back it’s hard to imagine how I was effective. However, I worked an early-morning janitor shift when I was in college before I had enough money to buy a car, so I was familiar with insomnia and how to push through it. When my head hit the pillow at 9pm each night I was thoroughly exhausted, but my body would consistently wake up 2 minutes before my alarm went off because I was so excited to get up and trade. I absolutely love this game.

The best part was that I was making money again, very consistently. Around March I went live with a counter-trend strategy that had me fading (and scaling into) extensions of old trends, in addition to my trend-following setup, and my profitability doubled very quickly. March and April were my best months ever. I started getting too aggressive and lazy with this new strategy though, and starting fading 2nd legs of new trends, which I had not previously done, and which ended up costing me big time in May. One morning I foolishly decided to trade, even though I had to catch a flight at 6:30am to go to Denver for work. I figured I could trade between 2-4:30, hop in the shower, go to the airport and then sleep during the flight. At about 3:30am I started fading the extension of a 2nd leg of a new trend, which ended up jamming much higher and faster than I anticipated. I had not yet suffered a loss with this strategy, but it became clear that I was about to. I kept waiting for the desired retracement to exit on, but it wasn’t coming. I kept scaling in at the levels I had previously determined, but did not like the way this felt. By the time the market reached its apex, I only had 15 minutes before I had to leave to catch my flight. I hadn’t even showered yet. I knew I couldn’t manage this trade any longer, so I exited in disgust near the absolute high of the move and caught my flight. When I got to Denver, I pulled up the chart to see that if I could have managed the trade for another hour and exited at my desired level, my loss would have been very minor. Instead, I lost all of April’s profits, and some of March’s.

The rest of May, and June were good trading months, and I made back the big loss and reached new equity highs. I started expanding into the DAX and Z (FTSE 100) for certain setups, which also helped my profitability. However, just like Taiwan, after the US bottomed in March, the volatility started draining out of Europe. I started seeing my setups occur less and less, and the setups became less profitable. I started having mornings where I would get up at 2am, sit there for 5 hours, and not make a single trade. I started having losing days more frequently. I found myself back where I was in December, looking for a new market to trade my setups profitably. To make matters worse, I was thoroughly exhausted. Months of insomnia were starting to take their toll, and my effectiveness was starting to slip at work. I knew I couldn’t keep this schedule up much longer, so after some coaxing from my wife I decided to take the summer off, regroup, and try to develop some strategies for low-volatility markets, then return to trading Europe after labor day.

I read 7 or 8 books during the summer of ’09, but the most influential was “Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar” by Al Brooks, which was recommended by another ET member. The book confirmed some theories I had previously developed (but never taken live) regarding entering trades on stops as price blew out of consolidation areas within a pullback. The book gave me a lot of ideas for both trend and counter-trend setups that I started experimenting with on the SIM by trading HSI and HHI at night for practice. Over time I refined the techniques into several distinct setups which I paper traded very seriously until I had reached $3k in paper profits by September. Having reached my goal, and having gotten used to sleep again, I decided to go live with these new setups trading the Heng Seng and HHI and forget about Europe. I couldn’t have been more excited or optimistic about my new strategy.

Well, by early November I had lost $5k, almost 15% of my account. I was dumbfounded at how poorly I had transitioned to trading these techniques live. I later learned that by using Ninja Trader as my paper trading software, it was giving me much better fills than reality. NT has a weird bug that only manifests itself when paper trading thin markets like the Heng Seng, where there is almost always a big spread between the bid and ask. It would consistently give me much better fills than reality, but I didn’t realize this until I went live. Furthermore, I had to face my demons with a strategy that inherently suffers a lot of losing trades, much more than I was used to. I used to go weeks without a losing trade, and now I had to deal with losing trades every night. This was a very difficult adjustment to make, and I found myself going “on-tilt” very frequently after the frustration would mount. I also had to deal with the inherent size of HSI, as average winners and losers would be around $125 USD, which I was not used to.

I had two primary problems back then: I never saw a setup I didn’t like, and after several losses I would start increasing my position size and reversing on losses expecting a breakout. If price refused to breakout from a congestion zone, I would get chopped to death. This would most often happen after 10pm, during the middle of the range and middle of the day. Eventually I just had to stop and admit that what I was doing wasn’t working.

After a week or two off, I learned about MHI, which is the mini Heng Seng, and is one fifth the size of HSI. I was surprised to learn that it was relatively liquid (I stress relatively, because HSI is by no means liquid). Its main disadvantage is that its commission is high compared to its tick value (relative to HSI). However, I decided I would rather lose money slowly instead of quickly, so I switched to MHI until I made back all the HKD I had lost. I knew it would be tough sledding, because I figured I’d probably pay more in commissions to my broker than I’d pay myself, but I figured if I could trade MHI profitably with these techniques then I could trade anything profitably.

Once I reduced my risk by trading MHI, I found that I was able to trade much more calmly and focused, and I started making money again. A normal win or loss with my strategy is generally only 200 HKD (~$25 USD), so I was able to forget about the money and just focus on trading well. I started refining and developing more rules for my setups, and just getting more screen time with the strategy helped as well. By the end of December I had made about $1000 USD trading MHI (although I probably paid $2k in commissions to IB that month).

 

[filter_sweep]

2010

Right before Christmas of 2009 I accepted a job with a different company, and decided sell my house and move to the other side of the city to be closer to the new job. I decided to take a couple months off from trading in order to manage the new chaos that was introduced into my life. I had no idea how much work it would be to start this new job, sell my house, find a new one, and orchestrate a move. It kicked my butt. However, it was well worth it, because my new job is much more stable, I travel a lot less, I live only 25 minutes from the office, and I have a lot more time to focus on trading. I also make a lot more than I used to, so I can now save a lot more money each month than before.

By mid March I was ready to start trading again. I picked up where I left off in December trading MHI with consistent profitability. Both April and May were good months, and I’ve continued to improve with my trade selection and trade management abilities. As of this week I am only about 11000 HKD (~$1400 USD) short of my goal to earn back everything I lost when I first started trading the Heng Seng, which is when I plan to switch over to HHI as my primary instrument to get out from under my huge commission burden and start trying to make some real money again.

However, with all that said, I still occasionally make stupid mistakes. These include overtrading and sizing up on reversals expecting a huge breakout. Up until this week I hadn’t actually suffered a loss from these flaws, but on Thursday night I finished down $160 USD after being up $140 USD after such a sequence (reversed on stops several times, kept sizing up, eventually had to close out before the lunch break). I have no intention of trading this way after I switch over to HHI, and I won’t keep enough HKD in my account to scale up in such a manner anyway, so I should not be trading that way now with MHI. It’s just been tempting to see a setup form, then think to myself: “it’s not the best looking setup, but I’ll take it anyway and reverse if it fails, since the failure of this setup will be an even better setup.” Again, I hadn’t lost money doing this until this week, but I knew all along that it was a stupid way to trade. I think it fundamentally has to do with the desire to avoid losses, much like the way I constructed my trading strategies during 2008 and 2009, and it has a martingale element which I find myself attracted to because emotionally I’d rather take all my losses at once than in small increments. This is what I want to overcome, and that is why I’ve started this journal.

 

[filter_sweep]

So there you have it, my entire trading history, warts and all. I feel like I’ve turned a major corner technically as trader, but now I need to turn the corner emotionally and lose the patience I have for my favorite mistakes. I’m hoping the journal will help keep me accountable while slogging through the rest of my sentence with MHI, and help me keep my sanity when I step back up to the big contracts again. I welcome your participation.

Trading starts Monday night!

 

[datamerc]

Best of luck to you filter_sweep. Your PMA throughout the ups and downs will make all the difference.

 

[~~~]

welcome to the "dim-sum" market ... where the IPO of some co. can jump more than 400% on the first day of trading (that's how millionaires are born over-night)

you're trading the hong kong market, u must always "aware" of the shanghai market and shenzhen market.

If you are very good at your job, pls stick to your job, your kids and you wife depent on you to bring home the bacon.

one thing is good that you don't trade during your office hour. Good Luck and you are your own judge whether is it "worthwhile" for you to trade after working long hours from your full-time job.

 

[coolweb]

You have what it takes to be a professional trader, continous refinement, except your path is in the wrong way,
trading HSI or any futures will never make anybody money. Trade something that pays a dividend or income so you can accurately judge the true value of the object.