Sebastian's Daytrading Journey

[Sebastian B 6]

EDIT:

I changed the topic of this thread. This is my journey to become a daytrader. I have some knowlegde and experience about trading already, however, daytrading is a different discipline within the big field of trading. If I'm gonna be successful or not we will see but I'm really trying this seriously.  I am definitely excited

 

 

Hi everyone,

for a couple of weeks I'm already thinking about writing kind of like a trading journal here. However, I got quite busy working through all the content on BBT besides a full-time job . In addition, I started to study machine learning online in part time alongside to my work for further education about 6 months ago. I still have 30 years of working in a regular job ahead of me unless trading would change my life. Also I do love my job developing software.

While you may lose everything you own materially e.g. in a bad crisis (I dont mean corona thats only a whirlwind, what I'm talking about is a real hurrican) you will keep what you have learned, your eduction, through any economical crisis. Also I got quite interested in ML and looking a couple of years or decades to the future, financial AI is the logical next step that the markets are heading to.

on the other hand, I dont want to wait too long to start with my "online-journal" because I think one or another thing might also be interesting for someone else. And I'd love to get in touch with other traders too, discuss ideas, approaches and take concerns or ideas of others into account. that is why I decided to start now.

I think I am only  presenting the most important thoughts, milestones and ideas of my way of becoming a day trader. It is not meant to be a fully qualified journal with daily updates, but rather weekly reviews. 

In addition I think it helps me writing off my ups and downs in trading and show the work I do as trading in gerneral

You are more than welcome for discussion here and I'm trying to respond to all questions asked if possible. 

 

that's it for now, good trades!

 

Edited September 2, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

I started this journal today because today I basically finished 2 important things

• setup tools (including DAS hotkeys, hot buttons layout)
• roadmap with milestones

currently I'm only looking at the first quarter ending 4th of october or also CW27-40 (calendar weeks) which i prefer to refer to in terms of project management. 

this post is about the roadmap.

I used peters ideas about the learn-plan-practice plan, which I call the LP4-plan. As I am not a bloody beginner, I packed the first 3 phasis quite tightly together. Also I paused my ML-studying for about 4 weeks until milestone 3 is reached. I am fine with that as long as I focus on studying the BBT content and not being lazy. after that, I must be able to run both.

creating the roadmap didnt take me much time as I created the exact same thing for my ML-studies. 

I currently have the 3 phasis learn, plan and practice planned out and each phase consists of different topics, e.g. watching the 32 webinars and rework the content. every day I write the time worked on a certain topic into this excel sheet. This is the real productive time, not including the "being lively on facebook while sitting at the trading desk"-time. I will write some more about time management and identifying time wasting habits another day.

the roadmap shows 5 important milestones within Q1. If you followed the webinars most things should be self explanatory.

I'm planning to switch to life-trading quite early and some may have concerns about that. However, I will only be live trading one day per week, every tuesday. I also use a very low risk per trade of $25 and a max daily loss of $75 I think or $100. Even if all 10 days hit the max daily loss I can afford it, that would be the worst scenario imo. And it is worth it to me to have a 10 real trading days sample of journal by the end of Q1 to work with and identify strengths and weaknesses, being able to measure how well I followed my rules and how  disciplined I was and to find out if there are any differences between simulation and live in my emotions. I use the same risk per trade in sim as in live-trading, $25 per trade. I am already quite emotional trading paper money. I want to get to the point that I dont feel a difference in emotion between sim and live-trading. 

I have already a good idea of my trading plan including risk and moneymanagement. That is first thing I did: answer all questions to the over 30 pages of the wilcox trading plan. You may find it on google. 

that's it for today. much longer text than I originally wanted to write. let me know what you think about it or if something is unclear what I'm trying to say, please also let me know. thanks.

another day, I will show my DAS layout and talk about hot keys and buttons I'm using

 

 

 

Edited August 2, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

today I signed up for chartlog. this week I wanna focus on creating a daytrading journal template. I have already watched all webinars related to that topic and will review my notes.

here is my overview that shows the current status.  The green webinars are the ones i wanna do this week. 8 webinars a week is a lot, especially if you take notes and try to understand it and get it into your head. I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish them all within the given time but then I may just leave some out and get back to them later. the last 20% consume 80% of the time, trying not to be a perfectionist. 

current status is as follows

webinars total	33
watched	16	48.5%
reworked	8	24.2%

 

workshops	14
watched	2	14%
reworked	0	0%

 

 

Edited August 3, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

traded $INTC long at 48.51 stop 48.49

stop below the 75000 shares wall. first partial at +5R level. 

total profit: +6.5R

really nice that was. also double bottom

 

Edited August 4, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

just a quick update here as it is quite some time ago already. 

 

• I have watched almost all success webinars and took notes on them and reviewed my notes
• I also set up DAS pro and already had my first live trading days. to be honest, they didnt work quite well yet. I use $25 risk per trade
• I'm still working a lot on my trading plan, e.g. defining goals, describing milestones, rewards, strategies, risk management. 
• currently I'm working on the journal template again. I am updating the total trader to be more convenient importing trades from DAS

 

this is my roadmap. I alsways write the hours spent on a job in the sheet. It just motivates me. Its currently about 30 hours a week I put into learning daytrading. The time went by so quickly its unbelievably

 

and here my webinar overview. I feel like the remaining ones dont help me a lot anymore so I'm focussing now on the planning phase as per Peters 5-phase plan. However, I'm finally also gonna do them too at least watch them.

Edited August 28, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

For my trading journal at least for the analysis I think I'm gonna use a spread sheet. I started off with a simple one made by myself and soon wanted to have some kind of auto import. Then I found out about the total trader. One issue with the total trader parser is that it doesnt combine multiple transactions when its actually one order. This leads to incorrect comission cost calculated.

below is an example of my 3rd live trading day. I was somewhat overtrading. You see right in the beginning, i bought 40 shares of MRNA but its 3 rows of entering the position.

 

so what I did is I extended the macros so that it combines those transactions.  whenever transactions have the same symbol and side and are executed within less than 2 seconds, the quantity is added up and the price is averaged and weighted by the size. 

Edited August 29, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

It really takes more time than expected to update the total trader and I'm really wondering who of you guys actually use it. For example another thing that isnt quite nice is that the trades arent sorted by the time when trade is entered. as long as you take only one trade at a time it doesnt matter but as soon as you are in multiple trades at a time, the journal gets kind of messy. So I wanted to have them sorted by entry time of the trade.

I think that is already a small improvement at least so that it is better to read. 

 

next I want to modify the sheet so that one row always represents one trade and includes all partials , adds as well as the stop price. I want to only press this excel button and then it basically generates the "profitability R's" overview automatically and you only have to manually set the strategy e.g. 5min ORB and type in the potential that the price moved based on your stop out strategy. e.g. if you set to b/e after it hits 1R you have to check the chart what was the max price before it hit the stop. This could be automated as well if you have the 1min quotes of that particular stock but for now not worth spending the time yet. 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

so this is the current status of my work for this weekend. didnt get as far as I wanted and while working with it I developed some new ideas.

the sheet in the picture below is 100% auto generated from DAS trades and order exports. The only thing that you need to make sure is that you always use Kyles Hot-button script to enter a trade. Otherwise the stop price cannot be parsed. When I trade the first 5minutes, I only use mental stops. However, to enter the trade and calculate share size I use the hot button. I just remove the stop afterwards. 

The only manual steps  that have to be done are:

• enter strategy e.g. 5min-ORB (I just c&p it from anther sheet)
• measure the potential that the stock price moved before hitting stop. I did that for NTNX and MSFT, A means stop to b/e after 2R partial hit, B means stop to b/e after 1R partial hit

With this data you can already make quite a decent analysis using excel on trade management, at least for the exit.

If I have once a lot of time then I would like to download the 1min quotes via an API for the stocks traded so you are able to run it in kind of like a simulation and use different stop and exit strategies over a certain sample set. e.g. you could vary your stop and make a study about it. One of my first steps of improving is the stop setting and partialling of my trades

 

Edited August 30, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

being above your daily profit target and then giving it all back to the market really feels even worse than just hitting the max daily loss and stop.

I havent talked about risk and money management yet. will do more detailed some time soon. 

just for now little quick, it is

• risk per trade: $25
• risk per day: $75
• risk per week: $125

 

TSLA 1min ORB down

 

ZM 5min ORB up

 

the difference in quality between above and below pic is unbelievably isnt it? dont know if you notice it but on 4k screen its big

 

here this is how i then gave it all back and the trigger was missing the NIO break HOD when breaking yesterdays high

 

Summary

• Traded the open very well with clean setups
• Was with +4.5R significantly above 3R daily target
• Allowed myself to do one more trade and if it’s a loser then stop for the day so that I don’t lose the profit target
• Failed and said same thing again one more, took B-C setups
• Then took even 2 more C setups and lost all gains of the day
• Feeling very bad about giving back all gains while already way above target
• Decided to close DAS and BBT chat and leave trading desk and stop trading for the day break even

 

I'm still busy with the journal template. As soon as its ready I will have more time to actually journal. This is just more or less copy&past from my word journal. I thought it might be a good idea to show a little how it is going and what I'm doing in terms of trading. Today was the 5th live (day-)trading day for me with DAS. 

video recaps how the others are doing it are quite nice, I may try that some time too.

 

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

This is my daily overview. It is going to be fully auto generated using DAS order export and IB trade log export and to the penny exact. However, as soon as I'm done with that journaling tool, I really need to focus on strategies more

 

 

today I managed not to give everything back again. Although the start of the trading day didnt look good. 

 

RKT long

 

PTON short

 

 

Summary

·       Was tired bc I only slept 4 hours at night, was thinking not to trade live but then decided to do it either way

·       Started trading with low confidence, then immediately had 2 fails

·       Got very careful, opened few positions and then closed them early

·       Then got a big winner with PTON short. Closed it first too but then reentered as it looked weak, good decision

·       Was around daily target (without commissions).

·       Allowed myself to do one more trade, took NIO closed early with minor loss.

·       Then sticked with my decision to not trade anymore but kept watching

·       Saw 2 more very good setups DKNG short and $NIO short but didn’t take it due to low confidence and didn’t want to lose it again as yesterday.

·       I am now +3R on the week, so this is still quite OK for first week live I think, weekly goal would be 10R

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sebastian B 6]

swing trading longs: AAPL, ROKU and TSLA on these dips

[Sebastian B 6]

I think next week everyone gonna look at the lows of today and ask themselves why they didnt buy. nothing has changed, the money printing is gonna continue and it goes the way of least resistance.

so Im adding into close here, also added to my CCL and long NCLH. cruisers are very strong.

 

Edited September 4, 2020 by Sebastian B

[Sebastian B 6]

VXX -8% while SPY down on the day. this anomality is staying quite a while already. If volatility goes down which is a measure for fear and uncertainty markets should actually go up. Its often an early indicator.

[OTC 27]

Hi Sebastian,

I noticed you were using Bart's Total Trader trader journal for a while and encountered some inefficiencies in the excel. Have you been able to sort those out or modify the excel to be more efficient? I also noticed you started using a paid trade journal so maybe you gave up on the Total Trader project. I have been using Tradervue for sometime but am looking to streamline some of my costs of doing business. one easy way would be to use a free trade journal but do't want to be bogged down by 'inputs' and cumbersome tasks. Thanks for your help.