2024-12-20 (Friday) — Want to Trade?

It’s amazing how quickly time flies these days.

Can’t believe it’s almost Christmas.

😶

Haven’t spent Christmas in Arkansas for a few years, at least. In 2022, I was in New Zealand.

I miss New Zealand. 🙃

Last year I was in Utah. I think I was in Arkansas for 2021, because I think I had covid over Christmas and was worried about not being allowed to go to Costa Rica.

Anyway, since I last wrote, I haven’t worked much. I was so far ahead of the game work wise because I was in front of the computer all the time scanning, so I was keeping myself busy working, but since finishing scanning, I haven’t done much working at all for JustAnswer. 😅

I answered a handful of questions today because I do need to answer at least a certain number so I don’t get docked in my compensation. So I’ll probably put in a relatively full day tomorrow.

Don’t remember when I’ve done what, so if I didn’t already mention that I sold my electric guitar, I sold my electric guitar. I spent a fair amount of time at the hill cleaning up leftover projects that I started, not wanting to leave messes for my hill family.

I also started getting back into stock trading again, this time treating it as an exercise in education instead of a quick money maker.

So I’ve been learning and learning and learning and learning. I’ve been trading with share sizes of one to six shares, until today, when I went as high as 50 shares, I think.

I’m going to go back down to probably five shares as my Max size until I have at least a couple weeks in a row of green days, but not just Green Days, days where I traded according to my chosen strategy and managed managed to be incomplete control of my emotions, at least to the point of maintaining self-discipline and not trading outside of my strategy.

We’ll see how things go. After a couple weeks of practice trading, I’m up about $36. 🙃

I’ve mostly had bad days, some of it related to poor self-discipline, mostly poor self-discipline, but also a fairly significant amount caused by the terrible platform that I’m using. I’m using. It’s the same one I used at the beginning last time and lost over $10,000 on.

I figured I would start with it this time again just to learn on, but the platform is so clunky and so unfriendly to day traders. Dad, it doesn’t even qualify as a decent platform to learn on because you can’t gauge how accurate you are because the tools are so clunky and glitchy that you don’t really know how well you’re doing.

Case in point, today, a started trading early this morning in pre-market, and was already up a little bit on the day, and getting ready to go into the morning Bell for the standard market, I felt like I was really solidly well positioned for two of the stocks that I was invested in to make big immediate moves on the opening bell. Bell. So I set my cell orders at a particular point, well above what I paid for the stocks, in anticipation that in the frenzy to open the day, there would be a high Spike followed by a pullback. Before going back up. I wanted to have my orders go through right on the immediate high Spike.

And what happened? The stocks both spiked up just as I expected, and I watched them go above my sell order point, but what happened?

My orders didn’t sell.

😶

😳

Panic set in. I was up massively on the stocks, but the orders weren’t going through. It was like the whole system just completely puked. I watched helplessly as the stocks bounced up Vega, but nothing happened. I tried to refresh the orders. I tried to cancel the orders to resend them. I went over to the website itself to try and do the order from the actual.com website instead of the desktop application.

Nothing worked.

😡

Eventually, I think I got the orders to go through from the desktop website, and though I did still manage to sell above my buying price, I think I sold for something like a dollar less per share than what I should have gotten.

I think that happened with two different stocks this morning.

Then on another stock that I was up on and should have made money on, I accidentally pressed the buy button instead of the cell button.

The buttons are super close together and not color coordinated like they are on other platforms, so it’s easy to accidentally click the wrong one in the frenzy of trying to get the orders made while the prices are where you want them.

My fault in one sense, but also one of the challenges of dealing with a terrible platform that I won’t have when I switch back to ThinkOrSwim again.

ThinkOrSwim certainly isn’t the best platform ever, but it really is Head and shoulders better than Fidelity’s Active Trader Pro, which is… atrocious.

Anyway, so I made some poor emotional choices after getting caught in that stock that I accidentally bought when I should have sold. It proceeded to plummet, and I stopped out with an absolutely massive loss.

I wanted to keep trading to try and make the money back, but all of the stocks that had looked good in the morning had burned themselves out and were basically useless. Trying to trade them would have simply been inviting poor setups and more losses.

So I jumped around to see what was going on with other stocks that I pay attention to, and I noticed that Tesla stock was trending back up after a down day yesterday. It seemed pretty strong in the morning, a fairly steady incremental climb back to the high of day after having hit it pretty quickly in the morning.

So I sized up on shares, which emotionally was a No-No, and strategically was, perhaps not a bad decision for regular Trader, but I’m supposed to be in my education phase, so I shouldn’t have sized up so much, but I was wanting to get back the massive amount that I had lost from that trade that went South by clicking the wrong button.

There were definitely some pretty Nerve-Wracking periods of time as I watched Tesla. Also drop after buying, probably three or four times, but I held because it had been a strong stock, incrementally inching back up to the high of day.

In the end, I managed to make back everything that I lost plus another $48, or so, which brought me all the way back into the green for my week or so of practice trading.

Because of the choices I made, today was more of an actual trading day and not a practice trading day, which I shouldn’t be doing right now, so it was a No-No, but it was a green No-No… so… I escaped my poor decision without injury–this time. 😅

I’m definitely getting a lot better prepared this time around. I still might not decide to continue with it, as I want to be spending my time doing the non-profit stuff, so this might end up just being a distraction.

Just thinking about the future and retirement and all that jazz and realizing that I don’t have a retirement account, or hadn’t until I opened one up just a few days ago. And knowing that any increase in the balance of a Roth IRA is not subject to taxes, that’s a pretty big motivator for wanting to learn how to stock trade because I could turn, theoretically, a handful of thousand dollars into millions and not have to pay a dime on the increase because of that particular government loophole that wants to encourage stock trading.

So if I could get good enough at day trading to be consistently in the green, then I could start day trading with my Roth IRA and not have to pay any taxes at all, even when I pull the money out, when I “retire.”

Anyway, so I’ve been learning to stock trade, and I’ve been working on the hill more than a little bit, and I’ve been consolidating and cleaning out and organizing and whatnot.

Caught a mouse in one of my humane traps in Rover and took it to the Pea Ridge military Park where I take all the other critters that I catch.

Punk chewed through my headphone marshmallow dealy.

All the time in front of the computer hasn’t done me very well at trimming down my weight to be ready for the wedding in January. 😅

I think I’ve lost maybe 6 lb, so I’m somewhere around 184 right now, I think.

Definitely still have a dad bod, though. 😅

I’ve got a couple more weeks before I run out of time for the tux fitting, so hopefully I can get myself down to 175ish. 🤞

Totally didn’t notice how much weight I’d gained, but I’ve pretty much cut out the junk, for the most part, and I’ve been eating less because I haven’t really been doing anything, other than burning stuff at the hill.

I feel like I must be missing something pretty big. But I can’t think of it. I wasted a bunch of my life watching all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica over the last… not very long. 😅

I’ve made little bits of progress on ideas for my Lift The World efforts.

I finally got my MRI bill submitted to my health share ministry people.

That might seem like a little thing, but when the last time I had to take time to submit medical stuff took perhaps dozens of hours of my life and a lot of stress and dealing with the runaround 80 gazillion times, I’ve had sort of an emotional block even trying to get it done this time, so I’ve had it on my to-do list for 3 months now.

It’s kind of sad, but it’s a pretty huge victory to get that done today.

What else… I smashed my pixel 7 Pro screen (yes, again), bought a pixel 8 Pro, drove to just south of Springfield, Missouri to buy my mom a pixel 7 Pro because her phone has been a nightmare for her lately, but that phone turned out to be a pain in the butt as well because it wasn’t just locked to AT&T, which is easy to unlock, it was locked to AT&T un and not unlockable because it hadn’t been paid off.

Ugh.

I ended up spending something like 12 hours between driving out and driving back and doing everything that I could think of to unlock the phone.

I actually managed to get some third-party software to go in and unlock the phone, but it wouldn’t let me unlock the phone and clone my mom’s phone to it at the same time, and I didn’t want my poor mom to have to spend hours redownloading all of her apps and contacts and everything. So… I put it up for sale again on Facebook marketplace, and I arranged with the guy I bought it from to return it, so I might be doing that tomorrow or Sunday. I’ll see.

Gave me an opportunity to drive Happy (The little blue BMW Z3 that I got for my mom to be able to drive).

I bought a cheap LCD screen this time for my pixel 7 Pro, an LCD screen that had absolutely awful reviews, but it was dirt cheap, and all I wanted to do was get my files off my phone, and the screen came in yesterday, and I installed it today, and I was at least able to get my files off my phone today. So all my files are off the phone. 🥳

Going to be a cold one tonight, and I just got back from the grocery store, and the van is getting cold because I’ve been sitting here dictating this journal entry with the van turned off, so the cold is definitely seeping in

I’m grateful that my spine issues have been much more manageable for most of the last week or so. Today was a rough day, but for the week prior, I was probably dealing with only about 30% of the normal strength of the various issues.

That was really nice, and I would be really grateful if after today’s rough day, that maybe, just maybe, I might have some more days with less intense pain and discomfort.

It makes such a huge difference. I noticed that I’m emotionally barely hanging on when the pain and discomfort is at those higher levels.

So I’m grateful for at least some period of reduction in pain and discomfort.

What else… I’ve been much more seriously looking for a place to live. I’m not willing to spend my savings on a house in an expensive area. And I consider anything above $300,000 to be expensive. 😅

I don’t really want to spend anything more than $100,000 on my living situation, so I think basically that’s going to be me buying a little bit of land somewhere and putting a little tiny home on it. Maybe a 16×50 little cabin with a couple of storage sheds as well.

There’s this 131 acre parcel just southeast of Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. It’s only $195,000 American dollars, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s got a kilometer of riverfront on the Bowson River, and it butts up against crown land, so nobody would be touching that land.

(sigh)

Dreams. With my starlink, I could work there without any problems. Just need to get my Jackery and my solar panel. 🙃

Cold though. Would be more like a vacation place. 6 months of winter, spring and fall and no summer (July is like highs in the mid 70s.

Haven’t figured out what I’m doing yet, but I’m more-actively trying to figure it out now.

Well, it’s 11:35, and I’m going to sign off for the night and crawl into bed.

G’night y’all.

Lift the world.

~ stephen