Quote from swing-scalper:
spanish89,
I happened to read your story. Quiet impressive. My question for you is:
Usually traders get better and better as experience and skills grow. This is especially true for new traders. In your case, your recent performance is worse than when you started as a newbie. What's the reason for this unusual contrast? Have you analyzed carefully what you did right in the past and what you did wrong recently? Are you confident that you do have a trading strategy which gives you some edge or your past success happened to be due to luck?
You don't need to answer me these questions. My intention is to inspire you to better analyse yourself. From I read, I feel you are a soul of high spirit, I believe you can identify the problems, make adjustments and improvements. This is the necessary process for every growing traders.
Best wishes and good trading.
Aloha mate and thanks for your friendly questions..
Hope your doing well recently.
The reason why i did alot better previous was a combination of extreme volatility (that suits me alot) & also more capital (had between 6k t 9k for 4months) so was able to trade bigger size and so earnt more.
I started trading partime while at college (last year in Febuary), and lost 2k in 3weeks at just £1 per tick on ftse (extremely impressive that i even managed to somehow do that). LOL
Since it means that it was technically possible for me to have made 2,000points profit from the ftse in those 3weeks.
I made the switch to specialising in crude oil in June, and due to sad personal reasons i was working 35 t 50hour days straight back then, so got the feel for the market.
And the day that oil went above $137 i saw it was way too high as people couldnt afford it, and so i only sold oil in calping from then onwards.
I didnt actually have a clear direct style or method back then,
it was simply a case of ONLY SELLING, and just trying to get that sell in as high as possible on the day.
(I used to sorta view days like triangles back then, so would try selling the middle top bit).
I was good i guess though, as was doing about 100 t 400ticks profit per day, while scalping 20+ trades per day using a 12ticks spread.
I only did sell trades all the way back down to $78s.
And form then on knew my 'only selling' method wouldnt work, and so i had to just invent a new method and start using it to earn a living. lol
So i just decided within a few minutes to range trade it by selling tops of big spikes/buying bottom of them.
And from mid September onwards i started to really get professional though, had a clear style and method of trading intra-day reversals, specialising in focusing on entering on head n shoulders formations,
and back with the great intraday volality we were havng i could smash 50ticks profit out of 6spikes per day, and at £3 - £9 per tick this added up to ALOT of easy easy money.
And then from early October till end of year i ramped the size up to £8 - £14 per tick, only traded 2 t 3days per week for a few hours, but taking 50ticks out of 3spikes per day in those few hours and i had £1,000+ per day, eacy day.
But from january this year onwards the market totally changed in its style of movement,
it became EXTREMELY slow and all movements that used to take a few seconds t few minutes, now takes a few hours to even a few days sometimes.
However i didnt change my style for the 3weeks between late Jan n mid Feb, and as a result i lost over £5,500.
(doesn't sound like much to most people, but for me that was over 50% my capital).
And then had to withdraw 1k more so had just 3.6k left.
Then had some further bad luck (internet down on days when it was easy trades/cutting profitable trades seconds before they spiked 100ticks in seconds so really could have used internet cut that day/contract expiry manipulation/ and trading with too big size for ther lower capital), which led me to lose 3k over next few days.
Things got extremely scary then, but its been 1month now from when i had to restart earning a living from just £605 capital,
and im still alive and making money.
(Still having lots of badluck and suffering from the problem ive always had of holding profitable trades for more than a few minutes/80ticks+, and thats really really hurt me badly)
Since this month i bought the dow 3x at the 6500s, each trade had target of 7026, but eachtime i cashed in after just 60points profit.
And i managed to miss those 3 250points+ really days, and instead made my money buying on the other 3days inbetween them, when the market was in down trends all day. lol
And for oil i bought 4x in the 40s-42s, target was 44/46 each trade, but again i cashed each in way too early for just 60ticks profit.
Its sad since just over 1week later the dow is nearly 1,000points higher, and oil is 800ticks higher.
But i still manage to make 20% - 30% profit per week from very cautious trades, and so im just manging to get by on day-to-day survival focused existence. :/
So its been a hard tough drop from the days of making £1,000+ profit per day,
to now having to make over 90% profit per month to just avoid becoming homeless and starving.
But its given me the experience and forced me to develop the skils ability to be able to consistently make 20%+ profit per week from money i cant afford to lose (so can take extremely low risks only n have to turn lots of riskier trades down), just to abvoid being homeless and starving.
Since while it is extremely unplesant and a horrificly stressful existence to have to live,
its the 1 and only way that you can truely manage to get your trading skill to such a high extent.
(Im not trying to brag or claim that im the master of trading or anything like that.. lol
And im also not suggesting that anyone put themselve into my situation where they are 'forced' to make double digit % profit weekly just to avoid being homeless and starving, merely to try gaining the trading skill that you would need to survive,
as its honestly no worth it, and im trying to get any sorta of stable income job asap)
*Sorry to everyone else in this thread for taking it off topic btw and giving my trading life-story.
