Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Titles that inform the reader are so damn important

It's funny that I am away from all of this so long each time that I have to go back and re-read the previous post. It's like reading someone else's journal because it's so fuzzy to me, but at some point I find myself going "Oh yeah! Damn."

Orange Juice has remained in the $1.70's, so yeah, I missed out big time. My sugar position is down $1,400 at the moment and is nearing a point at which I think I might want to add. It has not bothered me much beyond seeing it go negative the first few days. The thing is, I have been watching financial videos on YouTube and another, even crazier financial collapse seems inevitable. We have just run up the debt far too much, the stock market has run on levels of irrationality for a long time, and it has reached the point where the Fed is starting to raise interest rates. These and many other factors are all ingredients that are screaming for an unstoppable correction, we just don't know exactly when. It scares the shit out of me, because I still have the debt of my house. If for whatever reason my employer isn't positioned safely enough to handle this when it happens, I may be forced out of this comfy job. Also, friends and family I care deeply about are in massive debt, or unable to save as it is. It worries me greatly.

And then what usually happens happens. I know immediately that there are no mistakes, regardless of pain or pleasure. I could spend years of my life worrying about this next financial collapse (like I did wasting years of my life worrying about a military state taking over) to never have it effect me in a major way. Who the hell knows what specifically is going to happen to me or my family, but spending hours every day driving myself to an anxious death is not a wise way to spend my time here... 

You know, at the end of the day life is truly an amazing and strange thing. Simultaneously there are billions of people living out individually different perspectives, with individually different feelings about the same things. Some are at peace, some are ecstatically enthusiastic about it all, and some are on the brink of suicide over it all. I've been in each of those positions for sure, and I would rather be a balanced individual who is neither so optimistic as to be blind to information that holds serious weight, nor so analytical over things I cannot control as to hate my existence. 

So what do I do? Well, at the moment, I am financially positioned comfortably. I am aware that could change on a dime if I start trading a large account and get reckless. I thought reckless was spelled with a W, but spell check is telling me otherwise. One thing I can say, is that this train I am on just keeps me pulling into new and engaging situations. 

Not long ago, I noticed what seemed to be a pattern in the stocks I was watching. The pattern was that stocks that were active premarket and managed to break above their premarket highs at the open tended to keep going. I thought about looking into how often that happened so that I could possibly make a strategy out of it. Well, lo and behold one day on YouTube I just so happened to see a video from a trader that I saw frequently, but continuously ignored because I was already focused on  learning from Tim Sykes. I for whatever reason decided to actually take a look into this guy's content and found out that the pattern I thought I saw was indeed a significant observation. It turns out that he trades this exact thing and has called it a "Gap and Go" trade. Long story short, my wife and I have gravitated to his content and pretty much ignored Tim because we have seen so much more value in this guys personality and teachings. His name is Ross Cameron and he started this site called Warrior Trading. In just a week of diving into his free content we've both learned things that Tim Sykes never mentions, or if he mentions it, he is far too vague about it. We ended up joining Ross's chat room for $49/mo and it's been very interesting. The value has been like night and day. With Ross you get to watch him trade live every single day. You are literally watching a screen share of his trading as he explains his exact actions and thoughts about everything. Tim Sykes only offers live trading webinars twice a week, and you can only watch them if you are a current challenge student, which means you have paid Tim over $5k a year. 

Something I really have been thinking about, and want to express lately, is that I feel like finding Ross is going to be a game changer for me and here's why: Tim's mantra was "Study-Study-Study", and while I understand that studying is important, I got the impression from him that you must have your nose to the grindstone in a certain way all the time, no days off. Tim wants you reading SEC filings and looking into the fundamentals of the company and all that. I am not and was never against the necessity of studying those things, or the past behavior of stocks. Maybe I wasn't seeing something as clearly as I should have been in regards to Tim, but I always had this feeling that, regardless of how much you study, it all comes down to just trading the price. Yes, knowing that a stock is in horrible financial condition can give you a certain edge in how to trade it, or whether to avoid it at all. It might save you from buying something that is breaking out, that simply isn't likely to continue because it has a lot of people that can suddenly sell at a certain level. I was always in conflict between knowing a stock's story and condition deeply, and just wanting to trade the price action and the chart. I mean, you can know all there is to know and still lose on the stock. 

The driving thought that is growing with more conviction in me since finding Ross, is simply to ride the momentum of a stock as best you can, and cut losses quickly as soon as you think something is wrong. 

Ross has literally taken a $583 trading account and turned it into over $700,000 dollars as of now, and the recap of every single thing he did is on YouTube for free. It's kinda crazy. He even has a free E-book that is filled with his strategies and how to trade them. For free. 

So, I feel that as of July 7th 2018, which is when we purchased his live chat room, I feel that the sails on the boat of our future have caught a favorable wind that is going to help lead us toward a more beautiful and much desired place in the future. It feels freeing compared to being under the mentor-ship of Tim, because the struggle to learn felt never ending. The time constraints on pulling off trading throughout the day felt crushing somehow. And with Ross, I am comfortable with the idea that I can achieve my goals in 1-2 hours a day, leaving the rest of my busy life to do a few more things that give me some humanity, and sanity. As long as I can make it home early enough to wake up at 6 a.m. and trade the first 2 hours, I think I can pull this off. And now that I think of it, even during the last financial collapse, day traders still made a shit load of money. I just want to pay my house off so I can secure my families future. The rest is gravy. 

To move on, I want to explain something if I have not in previous posts. I am looking at my trading journey as of now, as 3 distinct phases. Phase 1 was me proving that I can simply rack up gains overall by purely focusing on entries and exits. Phase 2, which I am currently doing as of July, is to try and translate that same skill (which I have proven to myself) into increasing the actual dollar amount of the account I am demo trading. It may be confusing as to how that is any different than Phase 1, so let me explain. Phase 2 will involve increasing my focus and skills into actually paying attention to my position size. I have to calculate the number of shares each position will need to meet a certain dollar risk. During phase 1 I simply bought a stock and sold it for a loss or a gain, not sizing for any dollar risk. If I bought a stock at $1.24 and sold it for a 10% gain at $1.36 with 100 shares, that only gave me $.12 of profit. On a $100k account that is meaningless. I would now size up that same trade to 8,000 shares so that I were using 10% of my account on the position. If every trade I took was on the same stock at the same price it would be easy, but each stock I am trading varies a lot in price and thus I will need to build the skill to quickly know the appropriate size, adjust it in my platform, and execute the trades. It is crucial to do this in order to normalize risk on each and every trade I take, or I could be putting my account at a huge risk.

I still have some nuances to discover and understand I am sure of that, but I will figure it out. The main hindrance at the moment, is that Ross's trading style is quite different than the style I used in Phase 1. I don't have time to go into the details of it though, as I am getting unloaded and will have to drive soon. 

It feels good to be able to express some things. I know I don't post much, but I hope what I do post is something I can look back on and enjoy reading about later, whatever it is that I've transformed into.