Rewind back a couple years to where I would be falling asleep while writing my journal. I think that actually was April 2020, so two years pretty much exactly. That’s me today… eyes closing on me.
I decided to take today off. It was cold, and the wind was blowing hard, and I just wanted a break, so I stayed home. I spent a decent amount of time learning a different trading strategy than what I’ve been doing to this point, a strategy that’s more likely to help me achieve what I was hoping to achieve of being able to trade for an hour or two in the morning and call it good.
I traded for a lot longer than that today, just playing around mostly–getting familiar with the different aspects of the trading approach, getting more familiar with the software I’m using to trade, etc. I didn’t play with much money today at all, so the gains weren’t much (sometimes only trading one $2 share as I learned. The trader I’m learning from recommends trading in a simulator before using real money, but I find that trading with real money (even if it’s only a $2, where the max loss might be $0.20) is a better trainer because even with tiny amounts, there are still nerves, whereas in a simulator, I don’ know if there would be nerves. With zero consequences, there aren’t going to be too many nerves, I’d guess.
Anyway, it was a good training session today, I think. I probably bought and sold like… 17 times today? And I was 15 for 17 on those trades. My first loss was like my third trade, I think, and it was because I was a greenie to the new strategy and bought a position after forgetting to check that buy against a particular key indicator.
I didn’t make that mistake again.
After that loss, I think I rattled off 13 straight winners (with tiny share volumes, so almost nothing actually banked). Then I lost on my last trade of the day. It was an after hours trade, and I was sort of still just playing around, and after hours liquidity is much much less, and stocks are more erratic, and I lost on that one.
My biggest gainer of the day actually came on a stock that just… while trading at a certain level (say $2.04), I saw a handful of sells go through down in the $1.70s. I was like… huh… what the heck, maybe I’ll get lucky, and that quick sell will match up with my buy. So I put in a really low bid price, submitted the order, and promptly forgot that I’d made the order. It wasn’t until I was finishing up my trade session that I looked at my phone, which had been on silent, and saw the notification that I’d had a buy order go through.
My heart dropped.
I frantically pulled up my stock positions chart, and to my delight, the position was $139.99 in the green!!! I panic sold (remembering the principle, take the money that’s on the table), and I was on my way.
Funny… had I held that stock, I would have made hundreds more, as that particular stock spent the entire rest of the standard trading session just climbing and climbing. The stock went up nearly 200% on the day.
Anyway, so after the loss I took on the one before where I’d forgotten to check the indicator before buying (which would have told me not to buy had I remembered to look at it), that position lost about $60, so on the day, but the end of the day, with those two trades and then all the little tiny training trades, I ended the day $102 ish in the green and 15 for 17 (something like that) in profitable trades. Had I been trading with bigger dollar amounts, I would have made more, but mostly I was trading between 1 and 20 shares of a $2.50 stock, so… not really anything (though it is funny how the desire to win and not lose any money can still bring nerves even when we’re talking about a max potential loss of a couple of dimes. 🙃)
It was a lot of fun, actually, practicing that trade approach today. And a lot less stressful, being in and out so quickly. You’re just… done.
In other news, I put my battery-operated chainsaw to work today, going out in the woods and getting my lumberjack on for the first time in… ages. That was fun. Got myself in an bit of a funky position, you, maybe 15 feet off the ground with loads of sharp cedar branches on the ground below when my chainsaw’s chain jumped the bar and left me trying to figure out what to do up in the tree with almost nothing to hold onto (though there was some poison Ivy. 😬)
Gratefully, I managed to figure out how to wedge the battery in one place, and the pieces of the chainsaw in various places, pockets, pants, sitting precariously on the tree branches, while I disassembled the chainsaw, put the chain back on the bar (after untangling it), and put it all back together, all while way off the ground with not really much of anything to hold onto because I’d already cut nearly all the branches off, so I was holding onto nubs and using body weight and leverage to hold me in place while I fixed the chainsaw. That was… interesting.
Anyway, it’s starting to look a lot better in there, actually. So many dead trees and branches, sooooo many vines choking out trees, but I’m cutting them down. I did a really good job of clearing the vines out of a massive chunk of our forest on the back and side of the house, so now it’s the front’s turn.
What else… cross your fingers, I think I have a buyer for my dozer. I gave me a business check today, but he’ll replace that with cash tomorrow, so that’ll be really nice. Hard to take that big of a hit, but I’ve been taking hard hits a lot lately. What’s one more? 🙃 I’ll lose $9k and a ton of my time, energy, and effort, but there’s also wisdom and experience gained (at a steep price, but nonetheless). Hopefully, these experiences will help me make better choices in the future and perhaps be opportunities for others to learn from my mistakes, so they don’t have to make the same mistakes.
Well, it’s 9:38, and I’m really tired. Time for bed. I reached out to my programmers on the Modern English transliteration tool, and he’s gonna get me an update tomorrow. They’ve been taking a long time to get stuff done.
I’m making little bits of progress here and there. It’s slow, but it’s going.
Love to all of you. 🙂
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 