It was a bit of a rough night last night. I went to bed earlier than I have in a long long time, and I had crazy weird dreams all night, sort of lucid dreaming, I think.
I woke up for good I think somewhere around 5:10ish, finally giving up on the possibility of falling back asleep again before my 5:45 alarm.
I did decide to trade today.
And I was met with a nasty surprise. Apparently, I had left a position. Partially open. I guess I had 100 share position on a stock and only one of the hundred shares sold when I went to sell it, and I didn’t realize it was still open.
So I started the day today in the red, already having lost something like $60 or $70.
😕
I think I tried to take a couple trades after that, and they were very small losers, I think.
But then there was a stock that was just…. really good.
I think I started out going back to my small size, 100 shares, and it was like a $4 stock, or something like that. But as I started to trade the stock, I realized it was like a grade A setup. It wasn’t quite A plus, as a plus. Just starts to skyrocket and never shows any hesitation whatsoever, but it was definitely a grade a stock to trade.
Given the behavior of the stock, it felt sort of stupid to not size up, especially since I was so far in the hole yesterday, so I sized up, and when all was said and done on the day, I ended up green about $1,370.
🥳
So I need about 2,900 more to have my overall trading experience be break even, and about $3,400 more to get back to the level I was before I totally blew it.
It felt nice to have a winning day, and a really solid winning day after the complete demoralization of yesterday.
I still made some of the same mistakes today. I held too long on my winter after it started to fall, so I actually lost. I think $600 on my high of day. At one point, I think I was up about $1,800, but I didn’t get out quickly enough, and dropped down to about $170 in the green. Green. Then I traded a handful more stocks that got me up to a little over $1,400 in the green for the trading side of things, but then I had fees that brought me down to the $1370 number.
It’s funny, I had this thought come into my mind when I started trading again that if I traded I was going to take a huge loss.
I don’t know how to treat those thoughts anymore. I just don’t trust my ability to understand God anymore. Was it from God? Was it intuition? It wasn’t fear. That’s pretty much the only thing that I know for sure. When I had the thought, there wasn’t even a tiny inkling of fear. It was just sort of a matter of fact, if you trade, you’re going to take a huge loss.
And there’s a part of me that’s felt like I shouldn’t go back to trading, ever from the very beginning of starting back up again.
Maybe it’s just a distraction from the non-profit stuff.
But I can’t get myself to do the non-profit stuff. There’s so much energy and investment and commitment and stress and pressure with that. You don’t just start and then stop. And my brain can’t handle pressure right now. Not even a tiny little bit. I just shut down. I can’t do it. I’m pathetically weak right now.
Trading has been this thing that I could focus on at least a little bit and have some energy toward it.
It, too, is stressful, though.
Anyway, really nice to be up on the day and at least get a chunk back of what I lost. That’s about a 29% recuperation.
I’ll take it. I sort of wished I had sized up even more, but when I did try to size up more, that just meant that I was holding and losing more at the end. 😅
The beginning was when I should have sized up more.
You think about it. If you’re trading 100 shares, the stock goes down a dollar, you lose $100. If you’re trading a thousand shares, and the stock goes down a dollar, you’re losing $1000.
Gulp.
So with highly volatile stocks, he’s got to figure out how to get out quickly. I haven’t been willing to cut my losses, not wanting to lose. Element of just not wanting to lose., and I just have to be okay with losing, as that’s just part of trading. Are only right 65 to 80% of the time.
You’re always going to have bad trades. You’re always going to lose sometime.
In a way, if I’m able to and don’t crash and burn again, I could probably learn a lot from trading. I could learn to lose and be okay with it. I could learn to stop even when there’s more to be gained. It’s hard to walk away from opportunity. They call it FOMO–fear of missing out.
Anyway, the main reason for getting back in was to build up a retirement account tax-free.
Maybe I’ll still walk away.
We’ll see.
I wish I knew where I was going to live. It would make so much of everything I’m dealing with so much easier. I wouldn’t be worried about trying to figure out what to do with all my stuff. All my tools and equipment… I just buy a shed if the place I bought didn’t already have one, and I’d put all my stuff in it, lock the door, and do what I wanted to do.
After finishing trading, I worked on my trading settings a little bit, and I looked at my earnings for the month of December to just answered. I had a goal to beat my highest month, and had I not spent the entire day yesterday trading, I would have beaten it. As it is, I’ll come up about $300 short, I think.
I was close, though!
One of the things that I struggled with again today with my trading was the platform. It throws random errors out, and I noticed something that might just be a coincidence, but I think maybe it’s more than just a coincidence?
I don’t know why it would be technologically relevant, but I think I’ve narrowed down the point at which the trading platform bogs down to when I start trading Tesla. Tesla is kind of my go-to standby. It’s very hard for me to overall lose money trading Tesla. I’ve gotten really good at that stock, and if I just traded it all day, I could probably do really really well just with that one stock.
I just don’t want to trade all day. 🙃
I was already up. I think about $1,300 by :30 6:30 in the morning, after having only traded for 30 minutes. There’s usually a flurry of activity about 6:00 a.m. Central Time because that’s when extended hours opens for most trading platforms, even though some places allow you to trade 24/7, and then again a flurry right before the opening Bell and into the beginning of the normal trading day. If I only traded from 6:00 a.m. to 6:30 and 8:15 to 9:00, I’d probably do just fine.
That would be a potential goal, honestly.
Anyway, with so many issues dealing with the platform, and not 100% sure it wasn’t an issue with my computer itself unable to handle the demands of the platform, I decided to go out and look for a computer that would be much more capable of handling the trading requirement.
Potentially miraculously, I found a 2-year-old laptop just Southwest of Kansas City that had 64 GB of RAM, and an i7 processor. 😍
I sent him several messages, seeing if he was available and if he wouldn’t mind if I drove up from way down south.
Gratefully, at least I hope. Gratefully, right as I was about ready to head over to Haven Hill to try and get some things done, I got a message from him, and he was willing to let me drive up and wait for me, and he even let me talk him down on the price from $225 to $200.
That’s an absolute steal.
64 gigs of RAM in a laptop?!?!?!
An i7 processor?!?!
I’ll take it!
And that’s where you find me right now, after having driven the 3 and 1/2 hours from Pea Ridge to Shawnee, Kansas. I picked up the laptop, gave him the 200 bucks, it came with a charge, cable and brick, and I’m excited!
For security purposes, I’m going to do a factory reset, not that I don’t trust the guy, but I don’t know him, and I don’t want to deal with the possibility of spyware and key loggers or what not.
I’m almost home, at this point. Funny, once again, that I seem to think about writing in my journal when I hop in Rover to go for a drive.
Super crappy gas mileage, but Rover has starlink, which means I can take phone calls and what not while I drive and make money on the drive, so that pays for the gas and a little extra. Extra. Even with the cost of gas it would have been a price. I would have totally been willing to pay without reservation at all locally. If somebody asked 350 bucks for it, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. It would have been a great deal even then. So for me to get it for $200 for the computer and $85ish in gas, I’ll take it!
Not to mention that I’m always fairly productive while I’m driving. Even if I’m not answering phone calls. There’s always so much to do. 🙃
The long drives are hardly a waste of time. They’re actually an opportunity for me to get things done that I often don’t get done normally, such as writing in my journal.
Anyway, so that’s the day! I might write a little more if anything else comes up, but I think I’m going to call it for now. It’s about 8:45, and I finally set an alarm to write my journal, so the alarm is going to go off, and I’m going to have already written for the day. 🥳
In other news, I’ve dropped about 9 lbs. Which hasn’t really had anything to do with exercise because I’ve been sedentary. It just has to be with having changed my diet for the better. Guess that tells you how bad my diet had been. 😅
So I think I’m about 181 right now, and I should probably, unless I’m going to gain some muscle, get down to about 175 for all the excess rolly pollies to be gone. 🙃
So that’s a win.
I miss my comfort food. 🙃
Love and hugs.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 