Greetings friends and thanks for stopping by my blog.
What I wanted to talk about is the word failure. Ever since I was a kid the word failure has been burned into my brain as a bad thing. "You Failed" was what I heard a lot growing up but is failure really a bad thing? Ask Thomas Edison who failed 10,000 times while trying to invent the light bulb. What if he had given up after 9,999 times where would we be today? I am sure we would still have light bulbs but who knows how much longer it would have taken to invent. The Chinese do not really have a word for failure , their word means opportunity. What a great philosophy to have , you never fail at anything you just get another opportunity to figure out the right way.
Thomas J. Watson , the founder of IBM, was once asked in an interview what advice he had for young entrepreneurs his simple answer was " Double you rate of failure" , again what a great philosophy to have. The reason why I am speaking about this is that I had a series of losses in my trading last week. I tried to be a day trader. I tried to "quantum leap" the system so to speak.
Some of the best advice I was ever given on the subject of trading was to start with the higher time frames like daily charts and slowly work your way down. Test your strategy for at least 3-6 months and if profitable then trade real money. Only after you have traded successfully with real money for 6 months or so should you think about moving down tot he lower time frames. Well I decided I was good enough to just move forward anyway.
I have a trading system that I use , which you can see on my you tube channel click here that was working pretty well for me. I have a full time job also and seeing as how I work from home I assumed I could just be a day trader since I basically had 24 hr access to the market.
Let me just say that that was the biggest mistake I ever made. My regular day trading strategy was based on 1 hour charts and I was also trading news on a 5 minute chart. So I started day trading about 2 weeks ago using this system. I had some wins and some losses doing it which was probably pretty average but then I started to notice something. Not only was I having to take time out of my job every hour to look at the charts to see if there were any set ups , which caused me to negate my work at my full time job, but my losses were starting affect me in my personal life. I was snapping at my wife allot and I was in a real bad mood all the time and I kept losing more and more.
Finally when my account was about half way gone I took a step back and decided it was time to reevaluate. That was another good piece of advice I received as a new trader. So I decided that day trading was not for me right now. I decided to go back to what made me successful in the beginning and take the advice on trading the larger time frames. Well I am happy to report that I started this on Monday and have already had 2 trades win. Had I not taken a step back and re assessed my trading plan and strategy and not just kept doing what I was doing I was surely on my way to being part of the 90% of traders who fail at this.
In closing remember that failure is just another word for opportunity !
Happy Trading ,
Pipmeister
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
Why do you trade?
This is my first blog post. Why did I start one? Well I have always thought about doing it but just never really had the time what with school, work and my son. I realized that there never is a perfect time for anything so I needed to just do it.
The other day someone asked me a very simple yet interesting question: why do you trade?
That sounds like an easy question to answer yet I could not give a simple answer I just said because I like doing it. After I was done talking with him and we went our separate ways I really sat back and thought about this question. I asked myself "why DO I trade?" What is it that drew me to the markets in the first place? Why am I not doing something else like being a doctor or lawyer nuclear physicists? k the last one is a stretch but hey anything is possible!
Once I started to think about this I thought about my regular full time job which is ....lets just call it sales. I have a boss, a team, quotas, rules , starting times and ending times, pretty much your typical job that most people have. I have never really known anything else since my 33 years of being on this planet. They tell you " go to school , get good grades so you can get a good job" so I did but not necessary in that order but never the less I have them.
Then there is the markets. The markets do not yell at you when you come in late they do not care what time you come there or even if you come at all. The markets do not call you and yell at you about how you are not making quotas the market does not care as it has no quotas. The market is not nice to your face then talk behind your back once you leave. The market does not have good days or bad days, the people in the market may have but the market itself does not , it just has days. You can come to it everyday or none at all it is up to you. The market has no expectations of you or for you , you can take as much or as little from it that you desire. If you want to take your family on a vacation you do not have to ask the market for permission or ask it if you have enough sick days...it does not care about you. Please tell me what other thing is like that?
In the end the market is just a thing that has no emotions , no expectations and no judgements which is exactly what it takes to be successful at it.
Till next time ,
Pip Meister.
This is my first blog post. Why did I start one? Well I have always thought about doing it but just never really had the time what with school, work and my son. I realized that there never is a perfect time for anything so I needed to just do it.
The other day someone asked me a very simple yet interesting question: why do you trade?
That sounds like an easy question to answer yet I could not give a simple answer I just said because I like doing it. After I was done talking with him and we went our separate ways I really sat back and thought about this question. I asked myself "why DO I trade?" What is it that drew me to the markets in the first place? Why am I not doing something else like being a doctor or lawyer nuclear physicists? k the last one is a stretch but hey anything is possible!
Once I started to think about this I thought about my regular full time job which is ....lets just call it sales. I have a boss, a team, quotas, rules , starting times and ending times, pretty much your typical job that most people have. I have never really known anything else since my 33 years of being on this planet. They tell you " go to school , get good grades so you can get a good job" so I did but not necessary in that order but never the less I have them.
Then there is the markets. The markets do not yell at you when you come in late they do not care what time you come there or even if you come at all. The markets do not call you and yell at you about how you are not making quotas the market does not care as it has no quotas. The market is not nice to your face then talk behind your back once you leave. The market does not have good days or bad days, the people in the market may have but the market itself does not , it just has days. You can come to it everyday or none at all it is up to you. The market has no expectations of you or for you , you can take as much or as little from it that you desire. If you want to take your family on a vacation you do not have to ask the market for permission or ask it if you have enough sick days...it does not care about you. Please tell me what other thing is like that?
In the end the market is just a thing that has no emotions , no expectations and no judgements which is exactly what it takes to be successful at it.
Till next time ,
Pip Meister.
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