Skip to main content

My Day Trading Journey ep4 - First Steps

There are skills we each pick up during various times in our lives. When I started high school I was one of the very rare kids around me that had not yet learned to ice skate. It was in Kingston, Ontario, so you can imagine how rare this would be. My dad rented a back-hoe and dug out and area in the yard and filled it with water. When I first put on my skates, my ankles couldn't keep them upright and in my wobbly wa y I tried to figure out how to bend and push to get my skates to propel me forward. I did eventually figure it out of course, but it was initially hard work. 

I opened a paper trading account with TD Ameritrade, using their 'thinkorswim' platform. Apparently, without money in an account I get 2 months. Disappointing, but I have to start somewhere, and I'm not about to throw money away learning. I'll take the virtual trading while I can, thank you!

I've been approaching it in baby steps. It's still all quite foreign to me. The interface is not very intuitive oand I'm still learning where to put windows and how to make them in relation to each other. Sizing the time frame for each is still a bit uncertain but I'm slowly getting the hang of it, I think. What I have not yet done is configure hotkeys, nor how to figure out how to put in trailing stops. The exact choices of buying types and selling types I am not yet solid on, but I've experienced exactly how bad an idea it is to sell using Market orders. On one occasion I took a $30 gain and made it a $6 gain instead. So, the buying and selling mechanics I have to become more familiar with. 

  I understand the basics of how to scan for the types of stocks I'm looking for, so there's one step I'm not terrible at. And I've learned how to take the choices I want to look at more closely and put them in a watchlist. What I'm lacking are the right knowledge bits to know where to enter a trade, and as mentioned above, how to put in a trailing stop loss. 

I also joined the Bearish Bulls trade group. So far I haven't really utilized them much, but as I get better acquainted with the trading platform I'll get more involved. They have a morning show where they discuss stocks to keep a close eye on, with a mind to trade. They use skype as a daily chatroom for traders, and provide a watchlist at night with some stocks they recommend looking at more closely. 

As I've virtually traded two days now, I'm starting to realize how much I don't know and it's daunting. Fighting with the platform only makes the process more tedious as all I want to do is get it all working as I'd like and so I understand how to do what I want to do with it, so that I can stop fretting over it and can start trying to work at recognizing good stocks to trade by looking at them, and then looking for the patterns I want to recognize so that I can learn when to enter the trades, where to put my stop-losses, and where to take my profits. 

Baby steps.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Day Trading Journey ep3 - My Resources

My girlfriend of fifteen years has an unwavering confidence in my ability to do whatever I put my mind to. I think it borders on the delusional, but we can just call it a difference of opinion. However, one thing she does get at least partially right in the implication: I don't jump into anything by half-measures, and that extends to the resources that I draw on to better enable me to soak in the information I feel required. When I got into chess I bought a dozen books. When I got into the religious debates... Let's just say I have over a hundred books, shall we? Probably closer to two hundred if you count the Kindle books purchased. And so it is with trading. As I went over in an earlier post, my plan is to get my learning in before doing any trading. A key for me is to not jump the gun, but be patient enough to read the books and watch the videos to better leverage myself against the challenge of trading. I won't go through all my resources, only the ones I think impo...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Day Trading Journey Ep5 - From Confusion to Plans

When first getting into something new preconceptions inevitably quickly give way to confusion and frustration. Having paper traded a few days I realize how quickly I give up many of the lessons I assumed formed a foundation and which instead were quickly forgotten in my desire to start the process. I feel that I'm approaching this with such baby steps that I'm not diving in deep like I was. I did join the Bullish Bears, but I haven't really done anything with it yet except watch some of their videos, and used a couple of their scans for ideas. I have not yet joined their community or talked to members live. Part of it is I'm battling with the thinkorswim platform and trying to understand how to use the tools properly. The gaps I see now. 1. Understanding and using the trading buttons properly. I have not yet mapped any hotkeys, so using the right trading buttons in the right way is important and still a gap for me. 2. Scaling the charts the right way is somethin...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Day Trading Journey ep2 - Hopes and Expectations

I spent my Junior High days (grades 8 & 9) in a school in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of the tracts we could take was Social Studies, which involved History, Geography, and Civics. For some reason I really enjoyed them and at the end of the year there was an award presented with the person with the highest scores in the three classes. I won it easily in my first year. In my second year I was far in the lead, but for some reason there was a final project I needed to do and just couldn't motivate myself to do it. The teacher supervising Social Studies went so far as to call my parents and I into school to talk about it. He explained that all I needed to do was pass something in and I'd lock in the award again, but for some reason I never did. When school awards were being announced, the Social Studies teacher announced in front of the assembly that there was a big surprise on who won the award, and proceeded to call out another students name. I was crushed. I should have expe...
Post a Comment
Read more