Megamuel's Money Making Journal

Hello all,

So, I've decided to start a journal for 2 reasons:

1. For me to record my progress, and,
2. To post the many questions I have along the way!

Some of you may have seen me posting here and there but you probably have no idea who I am. Here is some background:

My name is Sam, I am 24 and I live in Chester, UK. I have been interested in trading now since July last year. I started out thinking I'd make easy money buying shares, waiting a few months and then selling them! I soon realised it wasn't that easy, and after the commission it would take me years to even break even on the small number of shares I was buying with my tiny amount of savings! Then came along this bear market and now recession to render those shares close to worthless! I like to think I've come a long way since then... I've read a few books, spend a lot of time on here reading and posting, and I have also taken up spreadbetting.

Over the last few months I've been testing out various strategies/ideas/techniques but mainly gambling as I have no 'Edge' as yet! As can be imagined I've had very limited success so far, although I'm pleased to say that I haven't lost anything yet - I'm actually up on what I started with which at least shows I have some concept of risk management I think! I've read lots about newbie traders blowing their accounts!

Anyway, I'm ready to take my trading to the next level now. I know I still have so much to learn but I am ready, and I am determined to succeed in trading. My reason for wanting this so much is quite a strong one. Since the age of 16 I have suffered with panic attacks. They caused me to drop out of uni and have been the cause of many problems in my social life and also when trying to pursue a career. I now find myself at 24 working behind the bar of my local pub, with no confidence and a fear of pushing myself into anything new. I am reasonably intelligent and I am physically and intellectually capable of much more, I just really struggle with my anxiety and panic attacks. I really believe that trading is for me and if I can succeed (when I succeed) as a trader it will help me massively with my confidence in all aspects of my life. Anyway, enough of the sad stuff!

Where am I now? I've saved £2000 capital - Don't laugh! It took me ages to save that as I have a very crap job! I've tried a number of strategies such as Elder's triple screen strategy, trading in line with companies releasing their results, and various day trading strategies using many combinations of useless indicators, however, I've not found anything I am comfortable with yet!

I hear a lot on here about there being thousands of profitable trading strategies out there as long as you stick to the rules... Well, where are those strategies??? I've not found one yet! Maybe you guys can point me in the right direction? Any suggestions are welcome!

I'm thinking about trying Mr. Charts' simple trading strategy and I have contemplated buying MrSpreadBettings system, but I am not willing to spend any more money on trading yet as I have been neglecting my girlfriend - LOL! I just want to go for it and start trading something. I don't mind loosing money, I think just going for it is the best way to learn. You can read a million books but it won't make you a good trader!

My goal for this year is to become a profitable trader and I would like to earn more than I do in my pub job (which isn't much) so that I can leave it and be a full time trader. Ok its a pretty tough goal but I think you have to aim high right?

So there it is:

Me,
£2000,
My Computer,
A whole lot of determination, and,
No strategy (Yet!).

Hope you will all enjoy following my progress!

Sam.

Good luck Sam. Look forward to hearing how things go!!
KJ

Hi Sam

I'm new to trading to and I have tried a number of trading platforms settling on Oanda.

I have not even started with real cash yet as I want to show I can Trade in profit before risking hard cash.

There is a lot of "What strategy you on" in truth the only strategy is at the end of the day your in profit, weather thats Day Trading, Weekly Trading or Long Term trading. But I guess we are all Day Traders at heart.

Simply as it sounds I read and follow the charts with no fancy indicators or trends just reading whats happening on the Year, Month, Day and Hour of a trade to see where its going and whee it may go. NO strategy is really going to tell you BUY or SELL because traders who follow these indicators are not using their own judgement but someone else's formula.

Now I'm new to this so what I say seems to work for me and thats the trick, each of us are different and iterpertate information differently and you have to find your own path.

£2000 WOW nice when I go live I will be starting with £200.

Don't make the mistake of taking your sites full leverage, some offer 300:1 Crazy I would say reduce your leverage to 50:1 that way if you get it wrong you have a chance to recover.

What Site (trading Platform) you using as I'm interested on feedback from other traders.

This weekend I found some very helpful videos which you may be interested in:
YouTube - InformedTrades's Channel

Come check in to my Journal "Oanda FXGame Trade" as I welcome all feedback.

Good Luck & I look forward to your Journal.
JD

Hi Sam,
JD's right. Informed trades rocks - but not as much as t2w...
KJ

Thanks for the support guys! JDTrader I have a spreadbetting account with interactive investor (iii), although I think the platform is supplied by City Index. I might open an account with IG too to see how they compare. Thanks for the advice and I'll definately check out that link. I won't be posting any trades here this week as I have been talking/thinking/reading/doing trading constantly for the last 6 months. I'm just gonna take a week to refresh and come back next week and get down to business! I'll probably just spend this week trying to choose a basic strategy to start with but I won't actually be doing any trades (unless I get withdrawel symptoms!).

All the best,

Sam.

PM sent sam.

So anyone have any suggestions for a strategy I can start with? Come on where are all these profitable strategies I've heard you all talking about

Sam.

Evening all,

So probably going to have a play around this week with Mr. Charts methodology. If your not familiar with this you can find the page here - http://www.trade2win.com/boards/us-stocks/38036-how-make-money-trading-markets.html Its pretty basic. It involves looking for clearly trending stocks and taking "a bite out of the trend". He looks for strongly trending stocks and enters on a series of higher highs or lower lows for shorts. No indicators, magic dots or lines! He does this on 1,3 and 5 minute charts but I will be using 5 minutes as I am spreadbetting I'll need bigger moves to cover the spreads. He makes it look very easy but I know it won't be! However, this for me is more about getting some practical experience and not making money, although the latter would obviously be nice! I'll only be trading minimum size bets, typically 50p for now. Sorry its not very exciting!

A few questions I need to ask myself:

How do I find and determine a strongly trending stock?
At what point do I enter?
Do I only trade in the direction of the main market?

I'll probably answer these as I go along but feel free to make some suggestions.

Mr. Charts doesn't wait for a specific number of candles before entering and he doesn't wait for any signals from indicators. However, he is a very experienced trader and I am not. So I would like to create some entry 'Rules' without changing the principle of the system.

Anyway, I'll be posting my progress so we'll see how this goes...

Sam.

Ok did my first trade today using the Mr. Charts technique and came out with a profit. Beginners luck maybe? The image is attached. It was on Microsoft. The stock gained well from the open and was on of the biggest risers. There was a small retracement. I then enetered after a series of rises (circled blue bar) at the line. Well I actually entered a bit before the line but with the spread this was my opening price. The next bar made me panic a bit... It went right down to the low of the previous bar but it did not exceed it and quickly went back up so I stayed in. This happened again on the 6th bar but the low of the previous bar was not exceeded. 3 more rising bars then the next took me out. Not as clean cut as Mr Charts' charts but a profit none the less. My bet size was 50p and my profit was a massive sum of £7.50! I mentioned the chart not being as clean cut as Mr. Charts'... on his long trades he seems to get all green bars after he enters and all red bars on shorts! Maybe I should have been looking for shorts today.... Anyway, unfortunately I have to go and get ready for my pub job now so I'll just have to wait until tomorrow to give my £7.50 back!

Sam.

megamuel said:

Evening all,

A few questions I need to ask myself:

How do I find and determine a strongly trending stock?
At what point do I enter?
Do I only trade in the direction of the main market?

Sam.

Click to expand...

gainers %/ Losers % or $ from a hot list like yahoo, cnn money or prophet.net

Want a nice consolidation at highs if going long, opposite for short and enter when momentum takes out highs/lows.

Helps if futures make a move up simultaneously if long opposite for short, but with strongly trending stocks they sometimes defy the main market.

you're at a huge disadvantage if day trading through a spreadbetting account for the obvious reasons, spread, quote bias etc.

megamuel said:

How do I find and determine a strongly trending stock?
At what point do I enter?
Do I only trade in the direction of the main market?

Click to expand...

Hi Sam,
Well done on your MSFT trade - it looks great to me. I recommend that you don't worry too much about the P/L in terms of £'s won or lost - but think more in terms of the cents per share. To grab +20c or so on MSFT is a very, very good start. If Mr. C' were to trade this stock, he'd probably have quite a large position size for various reasons:
1. Being the stock that it is, it's heavily traded and therefore it's extremely liquid with a tight spread.
2. It's not that volatile (compared to say, GOOG or AAPL), so you're looking for smaller moves than you would be from a very volatile stock that moves 2, 3 or 4 dollars or more each day.
3. It's relatively cheap.
Hopefully Mr. C' will comment from time to time, so I won't stick my oar in too much too soon. However, I'm sure he would advise that you keep a very close watch on the main market and go with the flow, don't try and get clever!
Good start, keep it up.
Tim.

megamuel said:

Hope you will all enjoy following my progress!

Sam.

Click to expand...

Sam, that's a great post and you sound like a very decent guy.

I empathise with your panic attacks because I have suffered from them too - it's an awful thing that not a lot of people understand unless they have experienced them.

But make sure that you are very clear on the reasons for your trading. Successful trading is first and foremost about making money. Many people approach it with completely different motives - ones they are often not even aware they have.

I mention this because it seemed like from your post that you are hoping that success in trading might give you confidence which in turn might help you with your anxieties.

Lastly, don't neglect your girlfriend. Women will put up with it for so long and then they won't anymore. And by then, it is often too late.

I lost my girlfriend of seven years. I miss her with all my heart. And I'd give it all up tomorrow to get her back.

Please don't make the same mistake as me.

Good luck mate and all the best. I believe you deserve it.

hi mega
Might want to try swing trading first to overcome spread etc. Same sort of strategy as intraday, strongly trending stocks, I.e weakest stocks,in a weak Market would be my current strategy. Add a few moving averages,200, 50, 20, weak stocks should be below all these and the moving averages should all be parallel. A good free newsletter which comes out everyday is Trade With Form - Algorithm based trading for the US markets, where Clive gives swing trading candidates.

Good luck m8

Hey Mega
What turned out to be a so so day has been v.good. Been going over some stuff for you and pulled this one out that I thought you might like. "how to trade breakouts". See a previous post of mine. www.trade2win.com/boards/us-stocks/24629-how-trade-breakouts-us-stocks.html

Lee,
No luck with the link in your last post.
(Good to see you back on the forums btw!)
Cheers,
Tim.

try now tim

Mega - congratulations on a succesful first trade!

Couple of points to make:

First, you say that you are thinking of buying MrSpreadBetting's system but you don't want to spend any money on trading just yet, but then you say you have two grand and you don't mind losing money. These seem to contradict each other, and imo, if you spend £150 and it stops you from losing £2k, then it was money well spent.

Having said that, I am not recommending his system as I haven't seen or used it, just think you should care more about losing money than spending it.

Second, on your trade, I wonder if you might be mixing two different systems. You looked for a retracement and then waited for some green candles to take an entry like Mr C. I don't know enough about Mr C's system to comment on whether he would have taken this trade. However, it seems to me that if you were looking for a retracement, then you are looking for a swing entry.

If this was the case then you could have got a better entry on the break of the first green candle around 1770, with your protective stop just under the low of that candle at 1765. This candle forms a swing low and entering here gives you a low risk, high probabilty trade.

Entering half way up the third green candle means there is a higher risk of the trade going wrong, even though you could be right about the direction. As you saw, the next candle very nearly stopped you out, even though the trend was still intact. That would have been very frustrating for your first trade.

Anyway, I shall be watching with interest and wish you good luck.

trader_dante said:

Successful trading is first and foremost about making money.

Click to expand...

SOCRATES said:

Actually it is very simple. The bottom liine is not about making money. It is about being right, consistently right.

...

Money is the ingredient that clouds the issue.

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SOCRATES said:

You do not realise all of this is not about money. It is about getting it consistently right.

...


It is brain power that allows the trader to be consistently right and not the motivation of making money, that is an added bonus but not the main focal point of the excercise.

The main focal point of the excercise is to overcome and succeed, and then to fully master, and then to perfect and then to absolutely and unquestionly master in totality, regardless of what instrument it is, or which market, or under which circumstances and in whatever size.

Click to expand...

SOCRATES said:

You are doing a disservice to newbies and gullible people here.

You may not be doing it deliberately, but nevertheless you are doing it.

It may be as a consequence of that which you personally persuade yourself to believe, and it is utter nonsense, and what is more, dangerous nonsense.

Click to expand...

:idea:

megamuel,
I've made a general comment over on my main current thread, link below.
This is not the set up I have discussed on that thread. May I suggest you look through every one of the charts on that thread and the visual impact might help solidify the set up in your mind.
Your trade was good and worked well, but it is quite different.
Good trading,
Richard

Actually there was a typical one of those set ups I traded this afternoon and I'll post it on my thread in a minute.
Read the words of wisdom from timsk and Pitbull, posts #10 and #11.
Richard