1.22.2023 7:40 am | Phoenix | Apartment Couch | Laptop
There needs to be a change in your timeline. You must be rational, and you must plan to the end. You must remember the purpose in which you came to this pursuit, and recognize the irrationality that may have already been baked into your energy from the start. Your plan—childish in retrospect—was to master trading in order to finance your lavish creative dreams. This is dangerous and folly. There has been much benefit, primary and secondary, that has come from the level of your energy in diving headlong into this pursuit (confrontation & refinement of patterns of discipline, organizational improvement, deep improvement in your capacity to use excel) and there can still be much gained from a consistent dedication to this craft, but you must deploy your time more evenly across your interests—particularly when it comes to this interest—as it’s the only topic among any of your others that, when you are not successful, costs you both time and money, the chief resources of your life and life force.
It is with this recognition & awareness that I need to extend my horizon. If I have any goals they should be extended by an order of magnitude, and the attitude with which I take up trading should be the same as an old man taking up carpentry or sculpture as a craft, with no rush or stress associated with progress, with the intent behind the pursuit being one of curiosity, experimentation, delight, and with any attachment to the results being only as significant as the satisfaction or dissatisfaction that a tyro sculpture might have with a lopsided piece, or the elation he might feel in triumph of his own skill when opening his kiln to a perfectly symmetrical mug. If I become a competent trader by the time I’m 40 years old, that would be a thorough success and should be seen as such. To expect, or count on, any sort of meaningful success—or expectation to rely on market skill to sustain my life—before such time is to place an unnecessary burden on the pursuit itself, and expedite your own path to ruin & dismay. This kind of pressure and stress might be tolerable if to trade was your life’s chief aim & sole source of fulfillment, but this is not the case. I entered this realm as a means to an end, and am staying because there is enough fulfillment that I do get of understanding the flows of markets across the world and the pulls and levers of finance that serve as the ventricles & arteries of society to justify an allocation of a part of my life force and time to engaging with the subject.
My goals should be as such:
Spend no more than 1-2 hours per day on trading or trading related activities.
Aim to trade 175 out of 250 trading days this year
Expect & aim to make no more than $100 per month & size according to this goal.
Aim to make $1000 this year. (If this seems like a paltry sum or a weak goal, be reminded that you’ve not been able to achieve even one green year so far in your nearly 3 years of practicing this craft.)
Aim to lose no more than $2000 this year and size according to this goal.
If $2000 is your account size, you should risk no more than $20 on any single trade. It might be wise to extend this to no more than $10 on any single trade. Do this for at least a month. I find my mind already itching to raise the stakes, rationalizing ‘once I build up a cushion I can do more’ or ‘you could blow that in 1 day how are you supposed to last the year, you make enough money to justify upping the stakes!’ The purpose of this outline is to recognize the function trading is supposed to play, and not let its tendrils slip into more of your life than it already has and rob you of the pursuit of your other more meaningful goals. Even in the time you were writing this you could have been pursuing something else.
Let trading be an exercise in personal discipline and a pursuit of understanding of the mechanics of economics and finance. That is the goal for this year. Create your outlines of monthly breakdowns from the starting points of the numbers you outlined above. And adhere to the time expenditure goals as well. no more than 10 hours of trading related activities per week.
1.22.2023 8:08 am | Phoenix | Apartment Couch | Laptop
Let trading be a game, and the dollar amounts be a measure of your own discipline. And do not conflate the size of the dollar wins with a reflection of success, it must be on a percentage basis. If you are consistently growing a $100 stake at a rate of 1% or 2% a week, that is as admirable & successful as if you were frowing a $100,000 success, if not more so, as maintaining a small size would be a testament to your mastery of your own discipline and this should be the goal. It is a game, and you need not suffer to play it.