Going Live

Today after trading and making $612, my wife asked me "Why aren't you live yet? What are you waiting for?" and I said "I don't really know honestly... but, if I'm going to go live I'll need a market data subscription for interactive brokers."

So I went online and added the live market data for $19.50 per month. I then logged into the live account and indeed saw that the data was live now. Then I took a look at $TLRY, a stock we have been paper trading for a month now. I saw a setup, and I clicked the buy button. I was in the stock and as soon as I was, a tab flipped up and blocked my view of the buy and sell buttons!!!

46 heart pounding seconds later, I figured out how to get rid of the damn tab and close the position. I could have made about $150 in those forty or so seconds, but I ended up banking $53. What's worse, I could have easily lost $150 too, but I got lucky.

After the trade I sat there shaking because of the frantic attempt to find my buttons again. I asked myself how much of that physical reaction was honestly due to the panic of not finding the buttons, and even now hours later, I'd say almost all of it. I did my best to rationalize what I was doing and stay zoomed out. At the end of the day I have been doing this profitably for 18 days straight now, and overall, I have several hundred trades under my belt that prove to me I know how to do this. It is so important to make it my mantra, that keeping losses small is the real strategy. As long as I am trading volatile stocks, buying on dips for the most part, and cutting losers, the winners will more than pay for them. Not only does it help to remember that, but it also helps to remember that I have plenty of money in the account, more waiting on the sidelines, and even more that I can save to refund this operation should the worst happen. But, I am not going to let the worst happen because I am in control of this. The only way I should be losing any large amounts of money is if my broker fails, which is highly unlikely.



After I was finished with the trade, I went into my spreadsheet to input it and was surprised to find out that the last real money trade I took was one year ago yesterday.

It's just kind of interesting to me. Anyhow, as I am writing this I am spending some quality time with the Trader Work Station platform (From Interactive Brokers) so that come Monday I am hopefully familiar enough and have my hotkeys workings correctly. It seems that I have it mostly figured out now.

Nov 6th Thoughts and first live trading video

I am getting unloaded and have some time to get this out, which I am thankful for, as I've been meaning to for a few days now.

So, there's been an interesting thing taking place within me, and I've been watching and noticing it. I am open to being wrong about this, but it seems to me that what has genuinely taken place since I've been trying to trade stocks these past few months, is that I have fallen under some certain impressions. I think I am realizing that I may be waking up from them. 

I don't know an eloquent way to say it, so I'll just be blunt. I think I've made trading far more complex and difficult than it really is, because-and only because, I paid what I felt was a lot of money for something. Back in April (I think) when I purchased Tim's Pennystocking Silver subscription for $1,000 (and immediately felt buyers remorse) it sparked a mental shift in me. This mental shift blinded me from the simplicity of trading concepts that I have learned over the years, and through his How to make Millions DVD. I suddenly wanted to get my moneys worth out of this purchase and became anxiously obsessed over watching and recording every video so I had all the content available to me after my subscription was over. Another way things shifted for me, was that I was now a part of the chat room and trade alerts. While I understood well enough that trade alerts are not to be followed and only used to show the reasoning behind Tim's trades, I found thought the chatroom would help me. What I found is that there is just so much noise, it's actually distracting from trading. Yes, there are people who alert stocks that are breaking out or setting up, but you know what? I find that I am and prefer to be (Because you need to be) self sufficient.

Why do I need people calling out stocks when I have a scanner that can find them for me? Yes, I will miss some things, like pumps or whatever, but what feels good to me is trading the biggest volume/% movers on the day that show up on everyones scanner. I don't need people to tell me in a chat room what I am already following. To speak more on the noise in the room, people are calling out trades and huge wins and all that, but the reality is, who the hell knows if that's real or fake, and even if someone makes an awesome trade, are they consistently profitable? It's far too easy to read a stream of all these great trades that strangers made and feel like you're missing out or incapable. My instincts tell me that the vast majority of those callouts are sloppy trades that people got lucky on. It's all just a waste, and certainly not worth the $1,000 per year to me.

So where am I noticing I am at recently? I find myself simplifying again and having seen benefits for it. I have to say something that has been gnawing at the back of my brain since diving in to SEC filings and all that: "Tim Gritanni, Tim's best performing student, barely even knew the news that was causing these stocks to move. He was literally trading the chart patterns alone. I found a huge dissonance within myself while trying to dig deep and make things work with information. Yes, information is important because there may be crucial details that may be red flags for not holding a stock overnight or something like that, but at the end of the day setups either work or they don't and you either have a reactive plan for what the chart does, or you don't.

I am not knocking the reading up on things and gathering information, but what I can say is that limiting that has actually helped me more consistently show up for the markets and opportunities. I was trying way too hard and spending way too much time forming ideas/plans about stocks based on news and filings, only to have the stock not react at all and be dead the next day. 

I am finding what works best for me is simply finding the stocks that are moving, have volume, and have a good reaction to a catalyst that makes sense to me, coupled with waiting for the chart to setup and give me a good risk to reward opportunity to strike. It's basically my age old approach with forex trading, except then I didn't wait for proper catalysts or understand a lot of the things I do now.

The strange thing (for lack of better phrasing) is that Tim is constantly saying "You have to study your ass off to make it!". Then he also say's "Don't be a slave to the markets because the point of trading is freedom to have the life you want."... Anyhow, these are just my current thoughts that have been gathering over basically, several months. 

On a side note, I recorded my first like trading session today and I think I'd like to routinely do that. Here you go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1vS8Tqem0