Hello everybody,
I am new here and this is my first post, although I have been lurking about for quite some time.
I'd like to start my trading journal here for couple of reasons, but first let me give you some background on who I am.
Basically, and very shortly, I started studying and practicing trading around 2 1/2 years ago, when I found myself without a job. Not a sad story actually, since I quit my job to follow my wife in her career around the world, and since I found myself unable to get a work permit I started thinking that learning trading could have been a viable alternative.
I then went through all the newbie stuffs, reading tons of books (most of which chosen randomly) and starting practicing trading systems. I am very quantitative by nature, so I basically refused to even understand such things as price action, chart reading, patterns and so on, and I found myself leaning badly on trend following systems.
To make a long story short, I have backtested my systems on a set of like 30 futures for the period 2007-2013, and then early 2014 I decided to go live. Or at least so I thought.
The thing is, my systems often require to stay in a trade for up to 12/18 months (I trade on the daily data), and since I didn't want to jump on trades that were already started when I decided to go live, I basically sat along the river and watched the most wonderful trades develop without having the chance (or better, without giving myself the chance) to jump on and profit of them.
The result has been that in these last 22 months I have basically been mostly paper trading, and the results of this testing are more than encouraging: with a starting capital of about 150k I would have netted something like 300k net of commissions and taxes, trading 28 futures, 1 contract of each.
At the same time, my actual results were pretty poor, and so starting from this month I decided to jump on the boat. I set all the positions exactly as my system dictates me to, and I would like now to share my trip.
The reasons for sharing are pretty basic: such a divergence between paper and actual results require me to focus on discipline and execution, and keeping a journal could be of great help in this.
Secondly, while reading ET and other forums I very seldom found people taking the same approach as mine to trading (perhaps here I saw GAT and a few others, but differently from him I don't come from a professional trading background), and since I am a very humble person I started wondering whether I could have become crazy and taken a path that nobody would take.
However, my backtested and paper trading results are there to prove that there is something to it, and hopefully I will be able to share this with you in the upcoming journey.
In my next post, I will post my current positions. They don't change very often, and I don't plan to update my P/L on daily basis. I will do that mostly on weekly basis, even because the daily results are not really of my interest.
LTT
I am new here and this is my first post, although I have been lurking about for quite some time.
I'd like to start my trading journal here for couple of reasons, but first let me give you some background on who I am.
Basically, and very shortly, I started studying and practicing trading around 2 1/2 years ago, when I found myself without a job. Not a sad story actually, since I quit my job to follow my wife in her career around the world, and since I found myself unable to get a work permit I started thinking that learning trading could have been a viable alternative.
I then went through all the newbie stuffs, reading tons of books (most of which chosen randomly) and starting practicing trading systems. I am very quantitative by nature, so I basically refused to even understand such things as price action, chart reading, patterns and so on, and I found myself leaning badly on trend following systems.
To make a long story short, I have backtested my systems on a set of like 30 futures for the period 2007-2013, and then early 2014 I decided to go live. Or at least so I thought.
The thing is, my systems often require to stay in a trade for up to 12/18 months (I trade on the daily data), and since I didn't want to jump on trades that were already started when I decided to go live, I basically sat along the river and watched the most wonderful trades develop without having the chance (or better, without giving myself the chance) to jump on and profit of them.
The result has been that in these last 22 months I have basically been mostly paper trading, and the results of this testing are more than encouraging: with a starting capital of about 150k I would have netted something like 300k net of commissions and taxes, trading 28 futures, 1 contract of each.
At the same time, my actual results were pretty poor, and so starting from this month I decided to jump on the boat. I set all the positions exactly as my system dictates me to, and I would like now to share my trip.
The reasons for sharing are pretty basic: such a divergence between paper and actual results require me to focus on discipline and execution, and keeping a journal could be of great help in this.
Secondly, while reading ET and other forums I very seldom found people taking the same approach as mine to trading (perhaps here I saw GAT and a few others, but differently from him I don't come from a professional trading background), and since I am a very humble person I started wondering whether I could have become crazy and taken a path that nobody would take.
However, my backtested and paper trading results are there to prove that there is something to it, and hopefully I will be able to share this with you in the upcoming journey.
In my next post, I will post my current positions. They don't change very often, and I don't plan to update my P/L on daily basis. I will do that mostly on weekly basis, even because the daily results are not really of my interest.
LTT
