15 Mar Small steps for a beginning trader

Hi guys,

I haven’t uploaded any­thing in a while and thought to give you guys an update on my progress. I feel that I am slow­ly get­ting bet­ter at trad­ing. The rate that I am improv­ing is nei­ther too slow or too fast for my feel­ing. I am get­ting more and more com­fort­able with the goals that I set and actu­al­ly fol­low­ing them. I’m sure most peo­ple, rich or poor, will laugh at my finan­cial goals but I don’t care. They are my goals. Para­me­ters I have set for myself to gauge my progress. I’m sure that if I had not talked about my account in Euros but in per­cent­ages it would not have had the same effect. Fur­ther­more, after hav­ing blown my account before, I thought to approach it a bit more cau­tious. Let’s have a look at what I did and where I stand now. 

It is not the size that mat­ters (or does it?)

So I put 200 Euros into an account and man­aged to drop that to about 120 Euros. Right now I am almost at my per­son­al baby step goal of 150. Why does this not cre­ate a wow fac­tor feel­ing to oth­ers than well just me?.. Los­ing mon­ey is easy. Mak­ing mon­ey con­sis­tent­ly is the ulti­mate goal here. Every trad­er los­es mon­ey. It’s con­sis­tent­ly mak­ing mon­ey over a long peri­od of time that counts. I hit 120 Euros in about mid Feb­ru­ary. After that I have been con­sis­tent­ly trad­ing. Con­sis­tent­ly trad­ing my plan that is. For the most part. I still make mis­takes but I under­stand that the mis­takes are my own for not fol­low­ing my plan. I am get­ting bet­ter at this and my small account shows that. 

Size does mat­ter. Just not the way you think it does. I look at trad­ing my plan and slow­ly get­ting com­fort­able los­ing mon­ey. This is why I trade small and am look­ing to increase my trad­ing posi­tions with every goal I reach. So what are my goals and what are my positions?

I trade WTI crude oil only. Some bro­kers call it USoil. What­ev­er. I day trade oil futures. I start­ed off trad­ing the small­est con­tract size which was 10 bar­rels. Recent­ly I start­ed trad­ing 20 bar­rels. Now that I am reach­ing my goal of 150 Euros I will increase my posi­tions to a min­i­mum of 40 bar­rels. This doesn’t mean I don’t take big­ger posi­tions. I do. When I feel very con­fi­dent in the pat­tern that I see I take posi­tions of up to 100 bar­rels. So that is my strat­e­gy. For very con­fi­dent moves I trade 100 bar­rels. For any­thing under I trade 20 bar­rels. Next up is the 40 bar­rel con­tract size. 

Why do I do this? 

Like I said. On one side I want to get used to los­ing mon­ey based on my posi­tion size (this can go red real­ly quick with trad­ing crude oil). On the oth­er side I want to earn the right to trade big­ger. This forces me to prove to myself that I am doing some­thing right and I have the P/L to con­firm this. With my grow­ing prof­it I grow more con­fi­dent and am anoth­er step clos­er to being a pro­fes­sion­al day trad­er. This is my dream. I will get there. Slow­ly and surely.

Thanks for read­ing. Let me know what you think and what your progress is. Troll me. Do what­ev­er. I hope I can find oth­ers that have decid­ed that trad­ing is their dream and path to fol­low. Safe trading.