Journey To The Bag

This is a weekly blog I will be writing every week aiming for no more than 1000 words a week. I will be journaling and documenting the journey that is about to take place giving you also insights to occurrences in the past regarding my journey.

As I write this on a Sunday afternoon, I am filled with euphoric delight into what is about to become, may the heavens open up and allow my vision to become a reality

So far I've been working on this for 3 years straight, hardly taking a day off whether that is a long or a short time to feel comfortable within the markets is up for debate, some say it should take 2, and I've seen a tweet saying it can take 6, so I leave that with the jury. Either way I'm happy to be at this space right now, and this week I hope to display my deserved happiness into my trading where is just to produce great trading.

First I want to give a shoutout to all my friends and family, even though I highly doubt they're going to be reading this. I have lost some good friends to this and made some along the way.

If you remove financial freedom from the equation, his game takes more than it gives, and its a common heartbreaking theme you see amongst up and coming traders, and not to come across as a narcissist but the oldage saying of "its lonely at the top" is one of the few ways to morally reconcile with the sacrifices needed, to not picking up the phone, attended important functions is all needed for the love of this bittersweet game, trading; and knowing that they will most probably never understand what it truly takes to get there I hope you find solace within this saying like I have.

Next week I'm trading DEMO, which is a taboo but it won't be for long, I have an array of prop firms I will be using within the up and coming month. I have used a few in the past and my strategies that I have been developing has been to trade prop as I know this is the only way for a super rich wannabe to quickly grow my account and by-pass the bourgeoisie. Fund wise I have been mostly in and out with BluFX and FTMO which is starting to gain popularity (according to my YT TL).

When I go live again I will be using BluFX with the obvious aim for being the one getting paid this time round which I forecast it taking 2 months with their $25k account.

Next week I'm looking for robustness and manoeuvrability, I have come to understand myself and once you know who you are, building a strategy around that is where the holy grail lies, so by achieving these key features within my strategy this will give me permission to add more resources to my strategy.

If you have read through this short intro, thank you, I am aiming for this to be a way of geting my trading thoughts in order as well as mental release which can be used to help yourself navigate this beautiful game. Comment, ask questions, I doubt this will be anything like the Joe Rogan of diaries so I'll be able to get back to everyone. Have a blessed week trading and I'll be writing again on Sunday to feed you in on the progress.

Peace.

I don't see anything wrong with trading on a demo, because it's a real workout that requires no investment and allows you to get acquainted with all the features of working on the market.
I think that on the contrary, traders should work with this tool as much as possible, because it helps to trace all the regularities and understand which methods of analysis and trading itself help you in your daily work. I even know many successful traders who continue to use the demo in 50% of their work, because it helps to get acquainted with new strategies or test some interesting hypotheses...
So work the way you want. And you don't have to look at the rules if it doesn't help you...

This week my trading was in the red, there was one particular trade during the ECB release where I made the majority of my losses, additional to that my trading style was average at best, I would describe myself as a systematic discretionary trader and I will give myself props for sticking to the systemic side of things but not so on the discretion as I saw additional opportunities to capitalise on what I would call temporary intraday patterns, of course, I am still developing my vanilla strategy which is where my focus remains but with time I aim to get to a level where I see these temporary patterns develop and I can capitalise easily.

Initially, when I started I dreamed of being just a systemic trader, having the ability to do the same thing over and over again and consistently stay in the green, I did manage to get close to this ideal through fundamental analysis but the number of false positives I racked up before I got a winner made me mentally fatigued despite my strategy being a profitable one as well as waiting for strong fundamental signals to appear which is not helped by the fact that central bankers like to be very ambiguous more times out of 10! However, it was at this point where I felt that I began to deserve my seat at the table of profitable traders, my win rate was really low (~30%), and being a fundamental trader at the time there isn't much you can change when it comes to signal generation if the fed a hawkish then you're guaranteed to make money going bullish on the dollar, so I began to look elsewhere harnessing the use and power of the butterfly effect (for those that don't know, this where you change one variable and it leads to a larger output), this larger output was being able to engineer a strategy were my winners where large however there's a caveat to this, like most things in life, the butterfly effect can lead to adverse effects if too many variables are added or taken away and you can end up with a different strategy, and this is why one must go through the process.

This is why I appreciate taking my time with my strategies, before changing anything I truly want to understand what it is I am doing in an ever-changing market environment and like @Cogra alluded to, get the best out of the rules that make sense to me.
As of next week, the minimum expectation is to be in the green, I will also be keeping notes on how I can improve my discretion, I will keep tabs on my other alpha-generating ideas main ones so far being adding more to winners my winners, a daily profit cap and once my win rate becomes stable an aggressive money management strategy.

Providing next week goes as planned I will be potentially going live via prop, I am at a crossroads as to whether I should go with a high levered fund time-limited fund or a slow-growth one with no time limit, the final choice I make will be determined by the results and style of trading I can achieve this coming week.

Till then have a blessed week trading and I'll be back next week with another report

Peace!

This week has been haphazard, firstly my payday was on Friday and I ended up taking a break, I feel somewhat bad for doing this has it shows a lack of discipline on my part, maybe mindful meditation here can help or perhaps taking a more structured approach to my recreation so that I do not need to feel the need to jump like an excited rabbit when the opportunity arises, this approach has helped my craving for soft drinks, for example, bulk buying energy drinks which helps me no longer crave the need for it, so by directly addressing the issue through exposure I can desensitise my self to its urges, and stick to the remixed saying of 'work hard but don't forget to play hard first'.

Tasked with finding consistency within the markets has again been tricky, along with my brief day off, I felt annoyed at the fact that I was having a lot of mini trades that was slowly bleeding my account, at one point I even thought of reversing my positions which is a feasible idea as trading on the 5 min you begin to understand how random the markets can get, and orders placed closer to price has an easier chance of getting hit, however, to win in this game one has to be the casino and a healthy RRR is the way to go about it, and my strategy relies on levels however I get into the trap of going for the hail mary RRRs, however since the introduction of the trailing stop I have been able to secure profit along the way - so I guess the point I am trying to get at here is that my number one task of just being profitable has been met with a lot of self-doubt and reoccurrence of issues that I had thought I learnt from previous trades. As I write this I know there is a high chance my intended goal from last week will not be achieved this week but I will be laying down the foundations for building a profitable strategy and I may run into repeat issues from previous trades, so I guess that is why I need to still trade on the sim account and I have not given myself permission to go live as of yet.

The issue of not reaching my goal I have put down to not winning hard enough, there may be other problems at play but this is the main one I have identified and can sort out. The way I will be going about this is to utilise the higher timeframes and really let these winners run, I am to do a backtest today (which I was meant to do on Friday!)

Other problems I anticipate is the cost of spread as I am still on a sim account I have not encountered live problems so far, however, I am adept at coding in MQL4 so over time this will not be an issue, and with the spread, I will pass the cost of this on to the market however I am also warry that spreads can change over time so this is another aspect I need to take into consideration, as to whether I limit my time in trades or have a system for moving stops etc but most of my trades are finished within an hour but when I start to use the higher TFs this will become more of an issue.

Tomorrow begins what might promise to be a tumultuous week if we take last weeks FOMC decision into account, may this added volatility bring us one step closer to the bag.

Till then have a blessed week trading and I'll be back next week with another report.

Peace!

My omnipotent self-awareness came when I was in high school and I saw Kanye Wests music video Power, at such a young age I was not fully aware what Kanye's intentions for the video were but it had touched me spiritually and I knew I wanted to transcend to a higher self and that was going to be via wealth, however, has time went on to reveal this endeavour of mine was like trying to conduct a mystical elixir that could make you live forever.

That was until last week! But let me update you on what happened the week before that! I missed my date to post on FF mainly because I was down due to having such a bad week, my strategy did not make money, I had to re-tinker a few things within my strategy as well and by Friday I had begun to enter the bottomless pit of self-doubt, but thanks to my journalling, relentless dedication I was able to use my skills to pivot back into profitability the following week.

This week I was impeccable, and I simply say this because I was intuned to the markets, I was prepared for a handful of different scenarios at a moments notice and at this flow states trading begun to become fun. Last week revealed that my edge within my trading is not the ability to trade a strategy (which I initially thought was the only way one could trade), but to pivot at a moments notice when things do not go as planned, i.e. when I start to see red.

Now there is a chance that this may be falsely positive, and the clouds may disappear and another peak on the mountain for me to climb will make itself apparent, and this is a scenario I am prepared for, But ff I am to be true to myself the possibility of this being a false positive errs to the left and I am confident that I will see a repeat of being in the green next week.

"No one man should have so much power" is the lyric that keeps ringing in my head as I begin to realise what opportunities lies ahead of me in the next couple of months, having failed many times on this journey one of my mindful techniques has been to live in the future, my friend once asked me for the date and I said it was 2022! As this was a version of myself I felt more comfortable with, and providing this week goes as planned my dreams will start to become a reality and my mental future and present will be one - I won't reveal all that I have planned as the main purpose for this blog at this moment in time is to hone in on all the nuances of making the transition of going from a non-profitable to a profitable trader.

Trading can be a weird job as our main goal is to make money however that can not be the top priority whilst you execute your strategy, as you can perform great trading and have a losing day, in my opinion. So as this week starts I will be aiming to be fully engaged with what is going on and in doing so the by-product of my success will see the money flow in.