Looking back over my journey = NAUSEA!

[SimpleMeLike]

Can anyone else relate? The excitement of the battle to make it to CP (consistent profitability) is over....and now there is just silence.

Weirdest feeling ever.

Congratulation to you JamesEM,

I have followed you on youtube for awhile and you have also gave me help alone your journey.

First off, you are very good writer.

I can not relate to your consistency profitability status yet, cause I a have not witness that for myself yet. But I am enjoying the journey.

I believe the hustle has left you. The hustle to find a winning trading method that fits your personality and style. You have found it, and like you stated, all you have to do now is do your job.

Your job know is to simply buy and sell as your boss (your trading strategy) tells you too.

I believe you grew as a trader with your complete understanding of Drawdown youtube video. You understood that drawdown is not your fault, its just the trading method having losses.

So, yes, I can imagine it is a bit boring now, just taking trades and waiting for profitability.

As others may I have said, I would encourage to further validate your method via programming the strategy and see how it has done in past years. This will further allow you to understand and maybe even sell your strategy, teach to others, or improve it.

Depending on your finical goals, you may even want to scale it up.

But one thing I can say is. Great job in pursuing your passion.

Think of all the money spent and time spent study trading as simply cost of college tuition. For example, an engineer spends 5 years in college study every single day some of the complex mathematics in the world. And the engineer pays the college to learn it. Now the engineer makes money in salary after graduation.

You are currently at the graduation stage of trading. There is lots of more money to made. Remember, you have to save money for retirement one day as well. Unless you want to trade til God takes you away.

But that's all blah blah blah for now. Keep on trading and having fun while doing it. The most important thing in life is to do what you enjoy everyday, teach your kids, and do whatever you want to do. And I believe you are doing that.

Great work.

 

[JamesEM]

Congrats James, always enjoyed reading your postings. Find some other thing to learn (musical instrument, language, programming).

Thanks Algofy! The problem isn't so much things to do/learn as I'm always engaged in both (gardening, chopping wood and IFS for example), it's that feeling of decompression after working really hard for the longest time and then realising that you've got it. I will be busy engaging in my first two passions soon (dancing and cooking) so I'm sure that will help!

 

[JamesEM]

The moment I'm bored and uninterested I know I'm falling behind as there are hungrier people coming up in the market all the time.

I don't feel that way about my trading business. As one person mentioned here, I study diligently and I'm very hungry but the chase is over. It's not something that consumes my whole being...difficult to explain.

And, of course, there are the real challenges of increasing size, as well as R & D to maintain/sharpen the edge but it's routine.

There's also the social factor - guess I'll have to stop working out at home and join a gym!

 

[JamesEM]

Congratulation to you JamesEM,

I have followed you on youtube for awhile and you have also gave me help alone your journey.

First off, you are very good writer.

I can not relate to your consistency profitability status yet, cause I a have not witness that for myself yet. But I am enjoying the journey.

I believe the hustle has left you. The hustle to find a winning trading method that fits your personality and style. You have found it, and like you stated, all you have to do now is do your job.

Your job know is to simply buy and sell as your boss (your trading strategy) tells you too.

I believe you grew as a trader with your complete understanding of Drawdown youtube video. You understood that drawdown is not your fault, its just the trading method having losses.

So, yes, I can imagine it is a bit boring now, just taking trades and waiting for profitability.

As others may I have said, I would encourage to further validate your method via programming the strategy and see how it has done in past years. This will further allow you to understand and maybe even sell your strategy, teach to others, or improve it.

Depending on your finical goals, you may even want to scale it up.

But one thing I can say is. Great job in pursuing your passion.

Think of all the money spent and time spent study trading as simply cost of college tuition. For example, an engineer spends 5 years in college study every single day some of the complex mathematics in the world. And the engineer pays the college to learn it. Now the engineer makes money in salary after graduation.

You are currently at the graduation stage of trading. There is lots of more money to made. Remember, you have to save money for retirement one day as well. Unless you want to trade til God takes you away.

But that's all blah blah blah for now. Keep on trading and having fun while doing it. The most important thing in life is to do what you enjoy everyday, teach your kids, and do whatever you want to do. And I believe you are doing that.

Great work.

Thanks for your comments (and compliment re: writing!) Simple

Yes, my focus now is to fill my days with other personal pursuits and spend even more time with the kids. I'm now able to take my daughter to school, dance/play/sing with them both without the markets being on my mind. Within the trading itself, the plan is to slowly add size and have another account to build as a retirement fund. Although I enjoy the intellectual challenge so much that, quite frankly, I wouldn't mind trading into old age...gotta be prepared all the same!

 

[algofy]

then realising that you've got it.

Just be sure to be careful, I've heard stories like this and some overconfidence added with some suboptimal market conditions can be a bad thing. Not being negative just pointing that out.

 

[d08]

I don't feel that way about my trading business. As one person mentioned here, I study diligently and I'm very hungry but the chase is over. It's not something that consumes my whole being...difficult to explain.

And, of course, there are the real challenges of increasing size, as well as R & D to maintain/sharpen the edge but it's routine.

There's also the social factor - guess I'll have to stop working out at home and join a gym!

That's obvious and same for me. It's very much routine and there is little newness in it. There are exceptions when I'm learning order executions in high detail, for example. For me to maintain size, locate liquidity is the hardest challenge. On that last thing, I'm ahead of you as I have a gym and pool at the compound, heh.

 

[vanzandt]

Thanks for your comments (and compliment re: writing!) Simple

Yes, my focus now is to fill my days with other personal pursuits and spend even more time with the kids. I'm now able to take my daughter to school, dance/play/sing with them both without the markets being on my mind. Within the trading itself, the plan is to slowly add size and have another account to build as a retirement fund. Although I enjoy the intellectual challenge so much that, quite frankly, I wouldn't mind trading into old age...gotta be prepared all the same!

Get a piano. A real piano.
I don't care if you've never played.
I promise you, from your posts and your vids... I KNOW you'll make it talk. Its in you.
And DON'T take lessons or watch YouTube's on how to play.
Just sit down, expand your mind, and let your hands do what your brain feels is right.
It will be the most rewarding thing you have ever done.
Its right up there with mastering trading.
It works.
You will take it and share it for the rest of your life.
Its in you..........

 

[syswizard]

I'm already helping my girlfriend - that's enough for me!

But is she paying you back ?

 

[comingkingofisrael]

For some reason, I decided to look for the details of my first ever live trade to share it on Twitter (you can check it out HERE). As you do when going through old documents/photos etc. I started to stop and read...

I saw 4 binders, rammed full of charts...some printed in colour, others black and white. Endless notes, doodles, calculations. I saw the receipt for the first seminar that I took on the day of my 26th birthday on the 11th of August 2006. £1600 for 3 days! I looked at the info they taught us and laughed and cringed at the same time. I looked at the letter of complaint I wrote to my bank when this same company reached into my bank account and took an additional, unauthorized, £500 as "pre-payment" for the advanced course that I had only expressed an interest in.

Flights to Florida for mentorship at $900/day (I did three days) with a lady who claimed to trade but conviently had broken internet access even though I could access her Wi-Fi with my Laptop. Jobs that I left (and replaced with not so nice agency work) just so I could trade the market open. Did I say charts?? Charts, charts and more charts!

Then there are the video journals. Literally 100's of GBs of video journals. Daily...weekly...monthly recaps. Oftentimes chasing my tail in a useless, but dogged, pursuit of trading success.

Then I saw my medical folder with all the health problems I developed whilst trying to climb this mountain called trading. High blood pressure...aldosteronism...eye-strain...insomnia. I was so determined, I sometimes spent 16 hours a day, practicing, studying. Replay on NinjaTrader. Painstaking, manual backtesting before. Endless self-talk and introspective study.

Then I laughed at the mistakes - how could I expect to make money trading 50-100 shares with a $3K account whilst paying $32 in commissions?!?! Trying to scalp the gbp/jpy (and other minors) with their huge 5,6,7 tick spreads....with a 10 tick stop!!! Taking out a £20K ($40K at the time) loan and hoping to trade it well enough, 1.5 years into my journey, to not only pay the monthly installment for the loan...but also to "live" off of....embarassingly naive to say the least....

I look at the young, determined, budding trader I was back then. FULL of optimism, living in London with a career as a professional chef...

Then I look at the battle-hardened, not-so-young, 37 year-old father that has turned the corner. There are a whole host of other life challenges that, together with (or perhaps "because of"..?) the treacherous journey towards profitability, have left me feeling beaten, tired and *almost* apathetic towards the very real skill that I now have that I fought so hard to attain.

I feel a sense of deep sadness, almost mourning, for the fact that my trading has become truly mundane. I have routines written on rich text files. I have spreadsheets and scorecards. I make videos capturing my trading and/or recapping the day that I keep privately in the cloud. I spend less time than ever trading and keeping records and yet I'm more profitable than ever. Today was my 13th winning trading day in-a-row (with the average winning day STILL larger than the average losing day) and yet I truly don't care. The plan is in place...I just do a job. I can't even be bothered to showboat on You Tube anymore! I've got lots of other, everyday things to do outside of the 2 hours a day I spend trading...

Can anyone else relate? The excitement of the battle to make it to CP (consistent profitability) is over....and now there is just silence.

Weirdest feeling ever.

It's probably just a good market

 

[Pekelo]

How did you do today? Today we got a little wind of the bear. I hope your last 3 weeks of consecutive winners is not due to you being long in a bull market. Were you mostly long?