Quote from Gringo:
I would tell myself to find DbPhoenix right away.
I've been trading, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes not at all, for almost nine years. I suck at it.
For the last several months I have essentially done what the title to this thread proposes - I have attempted to "go back in time to when I was a new trader." In the end, it has not been too difficult for me to do. I know dbphoenix would question this statement, as I know from reading his work here at ET how he feels about the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of overcoming years of failure and the emotional baggage that often accompanies it. But, I was never what anyone would consider a "serious" trader.
I have been more of a dabbler, a casually semi-serious hobbyist at best. I have had stretches where for months at a time I was in the market nearly every day trading something; and then other stretches where for months at a time I had no idea whether the markets where even still open, so little mind did I pay to them. I have a day job. I have never needed trading to be profitable (which is good, as I am a net loser of probably $60K over these past nine years), and I wasn't looking to "trade for a living."
I was serious enough to have bought dbphoenix's ebook years ago, but not serious enough to have read it at the time. Last summer, however, during my occasional lurking here at ET, I came across the "Straight Line" thread. I cannot describe the exact thought-process that brought it about, but as I was reading dbphoenix's thread, I thought to myself "Fooz, you suck at trading. Why is that?"
The answer, of course, is more complicated than I can explain, but in no small part it was because I had never traded with anything approaching a plan. I traded anything and everything, I flipped through charts and time frames and instruments looking for trades like an interior decorator flipping through carpet, paint, and wallpaper swatches. It would not be unusual for me to be trading forex, some stocks, a few options, and couple of different futures contracts all at once with no rhyme and certainly no reason. I thought I was looking for profitable situations, but I was really just looking for action.
Up until late this summer, I can say I have had thousands of hours of screen time, but I never approached it with the conscious goal of learning what was really behind those squiggles on the screen. I have a lot of trading experience, but it is of very, very poor quality. So I am, for all intents and purposes, a "beginner" who happens to have been in the process of "beginning" for a very long time.
Since September, I have taken dbphoenix's recommendations to heart. I stopped trading. I stopped "looking for trades" and instead "hired myself to do a job." After three months of intensive observation and study, I started paper trading - literally just watching price, and keeping a hand-written notebook of when I would enter and why, where I would stop out and why, and when I would exit and why. After about six weeks of that, I am now ready to start sim trading, where I will be entering trades using my broker's platform, but these will not be real money trades. Only once I am able to put together four profitable weeks on sim will I again approach the market with real money.
All this to say that your advice is sound - I would tell any noob to go and seek out dbphoenix (and I would also add that I have found nodoji's day trading journal and geez's 70K bet journal very, very helpful as well). However, as my case shows, you can find the right teacher from jump street (I was aware of dbphoenix and his writings for years), but it will do little good unless you know what it is you are looking for, what you wish to accomplish, and then do the work necessary to construct a plan for success that fits your very own personality, desires, and goals.
As dbphoenix says, "The first step is to decide what kind of trader you want to be." I avoided that step for nine years - and trust me, you do not want to miss that first step ... it's a doozy!
