Thank you everyone for your encouraging responses, I do feel better and more optimistic about the future after read what you all wrote....this is the first time in 7 years that I have admitted to others that my trading is not working (as far as supporting myself financially), and I feel a relief from saying it out loud.
I think the hardest part isn't so much the feeling of failure/wasted 7 years, but rather just the embarrassment of the hole in my resume and trying to explain this to employers. But it is what it is...I'm fixing up my resume and will be applying for data analyst/reporting analyst jobs later this week, as that is what I have experience in.....I may focus on applying to contract and short-term roles. I have found in the past that employers are often in desperate need to fill those types of jobs and will often overlook things since they know you are easily expendable. That's what I was forced to do when coming out of college during the 2008 financial crisis, and those types of jobs often lead to full-time offers once the employer realizes you are valuable...so I have no problem doing it again.
I think the reason I didn’t pursue secondary income sources was because to do so would be an admission of failure on some level. If my wife saw me leaving the house every day to do handyman work, she may have started to ask hard questions like “how much money are you making trading? How much are you making as a handyman? Are these two numbers added together less than what you were making in a corporate office? If not, then why not go back to the office?” It wasn’t laziness I can assure you of that.
In regards to the “stop being quitters” comment. I understand in America we love stories of people overcoming obstacles to achieve their dreams. I love those stories too…after 7 years of trying though, I need to be honest with myself. I’m damn near 40 years old. I’m not in my mid-20s anymore.
Imagine I set out on a voyage for the a planet, and I had my maps, 9 years of supplies and I expected it would take me 3-4 years to arrive at my destination…7 years into my voyage, I still have not found this new planet. I have 2 years of supplies left. Suddenly a ship shows up and offers me a ride back to the planet I came from….they know exactly how to get back to the planet I came from…should I wave them off, and tell them I will continue on this path that I am on with only 2 years of supplies left and no apparent sign of success?
I’m almost 40. The cavalry is not coming to bail me out. There is no pension waiting for me at 60. There is no trust fund waiting for me. I have maybe 15-20 years of good earning potential ahead of me, if that. What would you do?
I’m sure there are tens of thousands of guys over the years who played minor league baseball, hopeful that the call up to the majors was coming one day….the majority of minor leaguers will never get that call. We never read articles about them, we never hear about them. The only idiots as far as I am concerned are those who refuse to get honest about what they see in front of them. It is what it is.
I often wonder if professional baseball players didn’t make salaries, but instead started getting paid for hits/HRs/steals etc, and got penalized for making outs, how that would change hitter performance. I suspect that the majority of players would hit worse due to the pressure, but a few would rise to the top and do really well.
I think you make a good point here, but….at the end of the day I have bills to pay, and an opportunity cost of continuing to engage in this activity. I have truly wanted to be successful at this. But I need to be honest that I am not earning enough doing this. Hours of manually backtesting/tracking ideas before I knew how to program them into tradestation. Hundreds of excel notebooks saved on my computer from ideas I have tested. Countless articles/books I have read….and for what? I could have attempted to become an MD or something during this time.
As others have pointed out in this thread, there are ways to be successful in the financial markets that don’t include me having to try to force my will upon the market because I depend entirely on the markets to feed and house myself. I’m just dejected at this point. Hopefully with time I will gain clarity about this situation, and will be able to trade in a way that produces better results.
My answer here will be long-winded, but please bear with me…at this point it’s all shades of grey. In a sense I do think I have experienced to some mental fog from this experience that makes it hard to see things clear.
I used to journal that DAX European opening session. I would take notes on the price action on every single 10 minute bar. After doing this for a few months, you really do get a feel for what the market will do next. I would say you can predict the next move in the DAX with around a 70-75% accuracy when you are journaling so intensely like this, especially once you incorporate price targets based on measured moves, etc. Which is a pretty damn good success rate, when it comes to financial markets.
The problem of course is what you do with that 30% of the time you are wrong. A stop loss, obviously. But where does the stop/profit target go so that your risk-reward over a long distribution of trades is still positive?
Hard to determine this on the fly in real-time. So then you add filters…”yesterday the DAX was down by 1.5%, so I know there is a 72% chance the DAX’s low today is below yesterday’s low. But the market is opening with a bullish overnight gap….should I still take this long trade?...oh but wait, it’s the third week in April, and this is historically a bullish period for the DAX, so yes, I will take this long trade.” And then you take a loss….hmm, which do I rely on? My seasonal guide, price performance guide, or price bars guide?
These are the types of mental gymnastics I would go through while trying to refine an edge that I could execute on. The losses along the way just clouded the decision-making further…this is the sort of thing that pushed me towards fully systematic trading approaches. To get myself out of the way.
Thanks for the encouragement. I think there is a lot of truth to what you said there. The non-trading income will take an enormous pressure off my shoulders and allow me to operate in a relaxed way like I was in the past. I think I will make better decisions when I don’t feel like I have to extract money out of the market at all times to support myself….if you look at most of the great traders throughout the years, the vast majority had other peoples money/management fees involved. Perhaps they too needed a steady paycheck to trade successfully.
On the surface, what you said seems crazy, but after being in the markets this long I don’t think it is that crazy. If you can take $1K-$5K in a separate trading and completely not care about the money and go full swing with leverage you might be able to run it up very high. Larry Williams wrote a lot about this using Ralph Vince’s money management formula. That’s how he took $10K to $1M in a year in the Robbins World Cup of trading (in 1987 I believe). Although I do think this will be very hard to accomplish as well.
I actually heard Buffett say that he used to do a lot of stock charting in his younger years prior to reading Benjamin Graham, and then he abandoned short-term trading altogether. The thought that Buffett struggled with short-term trading makes me feel a lot better.
Yes, you are certainly right about stocks running for a long time. One good thing about this experience is that I have learned some things. Coming out of the 2020 COVID lows I made very good returns holding stocks for many months through wild fluctuations. The only reason I was able to do this is because I had that brain-muscle-memory of selling winners way too soon coming off the 2009 lows. So in that sense, I am hopeful about the future, because I know what to do when the market is coming off a major bottom.
If you’ve been able to do that, you have my admiration and respect. I have tried to trade those instruments during the 9:30-10AM US window, and have not had consistent success doing it.
Anyway.....thank you all for your encouraging words. My story is not yet finished. I read Harry Truman had a number of setbacks in his life and he still wound up being successful, So I'm not giving up on myself....just changing course a bit.
