Guest Blogger Val

 Hi from Kiki,

 I am posting another guest blogger tonight for EL as he is still training.  Thanks again Val.

 

I hope that with my post I will put thoughts about trading of some of the readers into long-term perspective. Learning to day trade in a country of good engineers, Germany, can become an additional obstacle to CP even with having that powerful tool, the Internet, and some very few truly pros  who are willing to give (fortunately). I am not going to talk about it here. The message I want to convey in the lines that will follow is “Learning to trade discretionary takes TIME”. So do not rush, especially when you just started!

When I got introduced to electronic day trading in 2007 by a professional futures trader who was featured in one of the Jack Schwager’s books, I saw candlesticks for the first time in my life. Having traded stocks in 2005-2007 and achieving 30% net gain on my working capital without using ANY indicators, made me become very self-confident, but on the other hand also ignorant to what this pro trader taught me about basics of trading in his seminar. The result was detrimental to my psychological well-being. After 3 months of SIM trading his methodology, I went live with one emini contract, suffered losses in my 3d week and stopped. The losses were much less what I lost trading stocks, but still it took me one full year to “get back to normal”…

And I am still in SIM. Do I regret it (I mean, 3 years of spending money for this stuff and getting no money back, you gotta be kidding)? NO! Because I have learnt a lot about myself and therefore will probably get to CP as fast as EL thinks we can during this 4month training period. I could keep writing about basics and about what every one should know before he/she starts and so on and on. Those who want to know will find out by themselves. I just want to state again: Learning to trade discretionary takes TIME. As any endeavour in our life! So take as much TIME as you feel you need. And do not forget your hard work ethic...

Hang in there,

Val