Great thread. Here’s my angle…
I got into trading (spread betting) because I liked the idea of becoming financially independent. I’ve always wanted to be my own boss and to work on my own doing something that takes advantage of my natural skills. Some years ago the company that I work for employed a management consultant to work with teams of staff to identify their strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the project I had identified what I expected – that I want to be responsible for myself, that I like to be left alone to get on with things and that I am highly analytical and methodical. This reinforced my belief that I should pursue my interest in trading.
I have never been a particularly social person – I find myself ill at ease in groups of people – always the one who’s left out in the cold struggling to join-in with group conversations and with the enduring sense that making myself heard among a group is an insurmountable task. I always quickly default to my naturally withdrawn state and find myself most at ease with my own thoughts. Furthermore, I’ve always been hopeless at making relationships with members of the opposite sex and have no desire to have children and very little desire to get married, so really a life of trading wouldn’t require me to sacrifice anything that I’m not getting anyway.
I started spread betting about five years ago, initially opening a demo account and doubling my virtual money in three months. I then put £1,000 into my account and started trading for real. Since then I found trading a struggle with emotions and information-overload getting in the way. Today I have £979 of the original £1,000, having been as high as £1,300 and as low as £440. One of the main problems I’ve encountered was information overload - I opened an account with IG Index a while back and quickly learned that the great thing about IG is their charts which offer just about every indicator imaginable… And the bad thing about IG is their charts which offer just about every indicator imaginable!!! Eventually I got so confused that I gave up and didn’t trade for months. Only last week, after carefully reading trader_dante’s fantastic thread about making money trading (thanks for taking so much time and effort t_d!) did I start trading again… and I used my ETX Capital (formerly TradIndex) account and Big Charts to manage my trade – I didn’t bother with IG’s wonderful (but overly elaborate for where I’m at right now) platform. I used t_d’s system to short the Nasdaq, opening a position last Thursday and hitting my target yesterday, taking 85 pips of profit. If I’d left the position open I’d have made quite a bit more, but what really pleases me is that I don’t regret in the slightest closing at my target, and I take heart from the fact that I’ve gained sufficient control of my emotions to be in this state.
So I feel that I’m well cut-out for trading. I want to trade because it interests me, and because it sits well with my desire to be my own boss, to be financially independent, and to work alone, and I now feel that I’ve finally cultivated the ‘mind’ element to a point where I can start to make steady profits and move towards the day when I can give up the ‘day job’. I can’t think of any occupation that better fits with my idea of a perfect job… Something where I work alone, am my own boss, am not responsible for anyone else or their security, can work where I want geographically, am not weighed-down by legislation as I would be if I had staff, do not have physical stock to store and shift… It really is what I WANT to do with my life, so I can’t see a sacrifice in doing it.