How I plan on “Making It”

I was playing around last night and a thought went through my head and I have had a hard time letting it go. “What are you going to do that is going to make you successful?” Now I know that in this life there are far more important things than money, but this is about my trading and that includes money. So here is a list of what is going to help me “Make It”.

1) Education – I will keep learning until I’m unable to learn any more. A big part of this continuing education is going to be my trading journal. I have to learn and understand myself to be truly successful. My belief is that to trade well you have to trade around who you are. If not it’s a much bigger up hill struggle than what it already is.

2) Risk Control – This is both on an individual trade basis and a portfolio basis. This is the “Key to the Kingdom” in this game. People don’t use the term “Precious Capital” as much as they should.

3) Keep my trading system simple. I will let everyone know right know that I did not graduate from a reputable school. This means that I work better around what I understand. This boils down to simplicity.

4) Adding to winners – Seems simple but can be very hard to do. This will be a big part of my journal, trying to understand how to do better at this aspect of my trading.

I’m sure some things will be added to this list as I go on. Here in the next few post I will lay out the rules for each type of trade. I need this laid out in front of me to have a pre and post trade studies.

Next Week

Next week is the beginning of my project here. The goal here is to focus on what I feel is the key points to being succeessful in this job called trading. The two points are education and risk control. I’m going to focus on these two areas of my trading along with keeping a good trading journal.

I was set up to have next week off to commit 100% to the project opening week. Well that has all changed. I think it will come together quicker if I do open it up in what is more my normal life. Part of the leaning process here is to find a good routine so that I can finish my work and still have time for my life. The start is not far away.

By the way. I was going through Trader Mikes site last night and found a few good articles on moving averages. Here is an interesting one on GMMA. I have yet to read it but it has some interesting concepts.  Here are a few more links to GMMA – StarTrader Report – Equis Video – PDF from Guppytraders.

A Few Things

I enjoyed a nice weekend and got back to work today. I started working on a spread sheet to use and it has become somewhat complex. Part of me likes this and the other debates when the law of diminishing returns is going to kick in. I found an interesting Add-In for excel on Fat Pitch. The problem is that it’s very easy to get carried away with all the data it allows you to bring in. The main thing I want my excel sheet to do is track the general numbers I use in my trading. I will keep my daily reports and trade journal in a blog format. I will then just hyper-link them from the spreadsheet. I will keep this post if anyone has any ideas or want to swap sheets.

I’m very new at this whole blog thing and have chosen to use WordPress because I think I hear it was real good. I have no idea. I’m wondering if I could put the spreadsheet somewhere that other people could download it. I’m also having a ton of problems trying to get a stock chart to come into the blog and still look right. When they shrink down they look wrong. Open to any ideas here as well. On the trading front I’m planning to have everything up and running on September 1st. Let’s put this to the test and see what we can learn.

A problem that I’ll still struggle with is what percent of my capital I should have working in the market given the different market situations. I know that I should be more long in an up market but how to play the flat times. This has got me wondering.