Live Trading Journey/Experience Till Date!

[Sultaan 7]

Hi All,

I created this topic so that Trader's can share their real time experience/journey in the world of Live Trading or with Bear Bull Traders. I find myself fortunate to be able to share my story as well as my 2 cents on the learning I have had from the mistakes till date. 

 

To start with, a brief about myself :

My name is Paras Jandwani, 29 yr old, basically from India but have been settled in Washington DC, USA for the past 5 years. I have been working with a Tech company named Accenture (Yep, not a full time Trader yet) as a Solutions Business Consultant for the past 9 years. From a very young age itself I was interested in Stock Market, following tickers and watching business programs etc. However, for some reason may be social pressure could never make a career in finance (no regrets though). Anyways long story short I opened multiple trading/Investing accounts back in India and invested money based on the FURU alerts or speculation. I eventually blew up my account 2 times leading me to take a break from Trading.

Trading Journey with Bear Bull Traders (then "Vancouver Traders")

It is always said that you can suppress your passion but can never wipe it out from your life. Since I had already moved to USA, the passion of making a living out of the stock market led me to look for options available to me to learn and explore the US Market. It was around August 2017 when I found your book on amazon with the title "How to day trade for living" which I thought exactly met my need. I immediately bought it and was impressed with the simple concise way the book was written and detailed about everything that needs to be performed step-by-step to become a Stock Trader. Currently, with the huge amount of options, with data available on google, the beginner's struggle a lot with what needs to be performed and are really confused if anything offered to them is genuine or not. The book written by you clarifies all of these confusion and give a very clear head start for beginner's trading career. 

                               After I read the book, I immediately joined the Bear Bull Traders (then Vancouver Traders) community in September 2017 and followed almost every small suggestions/guidance provided by you in the chatroom. I traded in SIM for 4 months and went live in Feb 2018. It's been almost 9 months live (every trading day from 8:30 am to 12 pm EST) and looking at the past where I was down with more than $ 6k in losses around the mid of June 2018 and gradually coming back to break even in Aug 2018 and currently sitting at a net profit of $ 3.5k.The figures might not seem big as I have always been a very risk averse Trader and when I started I used to trade with a volume of 20-50 shares for high priced stocks such as TSLA and 100-200 shares for mid-float stocks (I never traded low-float stocks, till date). Currently, I easily trade 500 - 750 shares/trade for mid-float and 200-300 shares/trade for high priced stock. I think every trader has to pass through a learning curve and should respect the process. I have made my own mistakes and learnt from it. I am still learning every day and happy to be able to lead my passion. Hope to be successful one day and trade full-time.

 

Below are some of the items that I learnt during the process :

1. You just need to master 1-2 strategies to be able make consistent money. (I tried multiple different strategies (not just from the book) to create an edge and ended up with being more confused)

2. Volume sizing should be a privilege and should be increased gradually in 10-20% every time when you are confident enough.(At the time, when I started making consistent profits with small volume of 100-200 shares I immediately started trading with 500-600 shares at a time which led to a lot emotions taking over leading to consistent losses)

3. Say NO to Averaging Down ( This type of trading saves you almost 90% of the time but would wipe out months of profit in a single day when it doesn't work. Been there and learnt it the hard way)

4. Higher number of tickets DO NOT guarantee higher profits. (I have a rule to Stop trading once I achieve my profit target or my max loss or 30 tickets/day. Number of tickets/day have saved me rule has been a very important for me to take selective trades. I remember my reckless/revenge trading having 223 tickets on one of the trading days which cost me hundred's of dollars in losses.)

5. Rules are meant NOT to be broken. (Almost every single time I broke my rules I paid the price for it)

6. Being patient with the winners and impatient with the losers. ( Almost every single trader faces that. I was very impatient with the winners and patient with losers which made my losses bigger then my profits)

7. Setting the stop loss right to either an indicator/support/resistance level (Had a very bad habit of setting the stop loss at the level based on the loss I was willing to take)

8. Importance of Journaling. (I use a software named Edgewonk for Journaling. My past chunk of trades gave me the indication that my win rate between 9:30 and 10 am is 76%, between 10 and 10:30 is mere 24% and 10:30 to 11: 30 is 64%.This was an eye opener for me. I almost immediately stopped trading between the time where my win rate was the lowest. This really helped me in maximizing my profits)

 

All the above mentioned experience wouldn't have been possible without a person who is a guide and a mentor, none other than Andrew!. I hope to continue learning from him and find myself fortunate to be a part of an amazing trading community.

Edited October 11, 2018 by paras.jandwani

[Meirlandau10 13]

Thanks,Paras. I can resonate with a lot of what you’re saying,although  I have much less experience than you. I started out about two months after being introduced to day trading by my financial advisor. Not liking the idea of trading fake money I started out trading 10 share lots and had some success over a short period of time. After that I decided to up it 100 share lots and then the emotions took over and I wasn’t following any rules as I was just trading impulsively.,causing a substantial amount of loss. So,I changed two things over the last few days 1. I’m taking journaling much more seriously,writing down the strategy and taking notes analyzing the trade I took. And,now I’m going to start exchanging my trades with a trading partner as we’ll view each other’s trades. 2. I cut my share size down to between 25-50 shares,depending on the volatility of the stock. And,so far so good, as I see some results. Although it’s small amounts of money,however,now I’m  just trying to focus on turning around my losing streak and becoming consistently profitable. And,I’m also feeling much more optimistic about the future. All of this I couldn’t of being working and battling with the greatest and most helpful community in the world,Bear Bull Traders. Thank you everybody for being so helpful and supportive,I greatly appreciate it.

 

 

[QiRa 3]

Hi Paras,

I just wanted to say thank you for posting this. I needed to be reminded that small winners add up but big losses can end your trading and it was a wakeup call for me. I have been stepping in with bigger share sizes while not being in control of my emotions and it's been pretty much a disaster. 

I am going to stay in low share sizes for the rest of the year and I'll come back here if I don't!