Confessions Part I !
AAaarghhh!!.. my first 2 posts were revolting. I am pretty level headed and love the comfort that I find when people agree with me on most things. I have a knack of saying things that people want to hear. However my last 2 posts were anything but honest. I started this blog for a different reason. No same old forex trading strategies, 300$ systems on sale, make 300$ into 30,000$ in one year schemes.
I want this blog to be about me and my struggles trading forex markets. My inner conflicts,,self doubts, my desperation, I want to break free. The markets are my life's canvas. It makes me jubiliant , it breaks me down mentally, frustrated at my self and sometimes I can really just sit and watch the markets as they unfold like someone watching an Opera.
I am a guy who can do most things but not really good at anything. A rudderless ship in a storm heading nowhere. There really was no passion in my life. I like sports,,really I can sit and watch anything. Passion for any particular hobbies? Not really...the usual,, reading , movies,travelling. You know the stuff. Where is that spark which can ignite a forest fire? Really, can you be good at anything where there is not passion? I have spent countless hours pondering the same question.. trying to understand what realy is it that I was meant to do.
Believe me some people have it easy. Ask Tiger woods or Roger Federer.Or John Grisham. Some people just come with a direction. People like me have to struggle. Some for years. I spent years making money doing I never really cared about or had passion for. I hated the authority that someone could have over my life. Life was indeed heading down a dark lane.
The answers have come, slowly at first and then like an avalanche, when one day pondering over my charts, I forgot I had been sitting at the desk for about14hours straight. It struck me, I love this job and there is nothing I would love better than trade. Since then its been an obsession,passion and my "life's song".
I have chucked my well paying job, taken a turn and headed down a path where I am staking everything I have on the line when I sit in front of the computer each day. I love it, I find it comforting to be finally doing what I love. I am ready to spend as much time is required, and as much study as required. This is my dream.
I have never really been a prayers person. The markets couldnt care less either way. Yet I am seeking comfort in few words of wisdom about courage....
"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit".
Learning the Game!
My first tryst with trading began with what in my terms was a disaster. This was the time when I barely knew the difference between a company stock and live stock. Internet was in its boom years and I gathered all the information regarding what a stock is,, whats a stock exchange and what it required to trade. As fate would have it,,, there was an advertisement in the newspaper. The person claimed that he was teaching to trade the futures markets and it cost about a 100$ to learn to trade. He rarely looked at charts and his idea of trading was betting 100% of the equity on all trades. I never knew any better and all I could see was the dream house on the beach as I went to sleep. Well, as I should have known,, I lost close to half my equity in 7 days and a quarter of that in about 2 minutes flat. The shock was quite unbearable. It did not take a flash of lightning to tell me that my mentor knew less than me about trading.
I was already hooked and the next step was trying to figure out how to trade. Technical Analysis seemed the way to go, charts are easier to read and make sense of than fundamentals.
Moving averages, stochs,MAcd, occillators of every kind, and system testing.It just got harder. I had at one time about 7 indicators on my screen and it made it that much harder to trade.
I have since then realized that most indicators are lagging. Price is the ultimate indicator and the way to make money in daytrading is to catch small trends and exit with a profit or loss.
The question remained though,,how do I accomplish this. I wanted to keep it simple, most of my loosing trades were becoz I either entered too late or exited too late when prices had already reversed.
I had to begin a demo trading account and try and test various strategies. Forex being highly liquid and commission free seemed the best choice and I guess thats one of the best decisions I have made.
How did it go from here onwards? I will keep you posted.
The Forex Way!!
For all those who are trading and those who are embarking on this path, this journal is just my views on forex trading and related articles.
I am at an intermediate level and I live to trade and learn and read about forex trading.
I will do what I am good at..... keeping it simple. I have spent a lot of time analysing charts, strategies, reading tons of trading books and sifting through thousands of trading related websites. Most of them are roads leading down nowhere. Its a paradox of sorts. Most of the information out there really works and yet they dont work. As a trader its a journey to find out what suits each person individually. There simply is no magical holy grail. And yet most of the beginners will still take that road in search of a black box or system generating signals. And yet trading is being sold out there by people claiming to make thousands of pips. Why would I want to sell my system if it makes thousands of pips?
A journey of thousand miles starts with first step. I have taken my first and the journey is beautiful. There is a lot of heartache and small triumphs... as I continue to devote my time to learn and trade the forex markets. But looking back I can say that the journey has been worth it. For a person who has no mentor and struggled years to make sense of the markets, I would like to thank all those countless people who have contributed in any small way to my trading. I hope that in the coming years I can truly call myself a Currency trader and somewhere out there someone is on the verge of quitting the trading game takes heart from what I put down here and continues in his/her quest to trading. There truly is no other career that is as liberating as trading. Each day continues to be new and exciting as the previous one.
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