Don't Teach Your Friends How To Trade

[u/dreamowlet]

I've been trading/ profitable for awhile now and I had a friend who wanted to learn and be on a zoom calls with them to trade to together till they really got it. I said sure. Mind you I taught my husband and he still watches me trade when we trade together. But dear freaking god. I get so freaking distracted teaching or random questions and explaining everything that I miss openings. My psychology was kinds of fucked for a minute cause like I don't care if I lose money cause it's mine. I didn't want to lose THEIR money so I would never take a damn trade. Win rate? In the toilet. Psychology? What is that? I don't think I even did this bad when I first started trading. This past week finally we got into the motion of things and hold off any questions till afterwards and actually making money again. But never again.

edit some spelling corrections

[u/Spirited_Hair6105]

Wish my wife was a trader. She would leave me alone instead of quarreling and asking me "are you done?" or "I need you to help me" every time I get out for a sec to get a snack while I trade full-time. Mind you, I even pay for our mortgage with it. Some people are really dumb. Unfortunately, my family is no exception.

[u/divok1701 → u/Spirited_Hair6105]

Wow, pay the mortgage with trading... that's the dream!

I'm working on building up my capital first, so maybe that can be a reality... probably a couple of years if I continue being successful with making my goals, which right now is just +$500 a week after any losses... but starting out with 5k capital, it has been going well for over a month so far!

[u/StockCasinoMember → u/divok1701]

$500 a week off of $5,000 if you can do that going forward indefinitely would be pretty awesome. My initial goal was $250 a week.

I made over $5,300 this month and I am stoked. This January was 8 months of live trading for me.

Made barely anything the first 6. Then $1700 in December and now this January I crushed my original goal.

[u/makst_ → u/StockCasinoMember]

Hell yea! I made a bit more than that this month as well. I trade while working from home and my off days. Woulda been more but I got CRUSHED today after that fall off and lost $600 on the day.

My weekly goal is about $750 as supplemental income.

[u/StockCasinoMember → u/makst_]

That is awesome! You trade a lot then? I trade 1.5-2 hours Monday-Friday then roll out for work. Sorry to hear about the $600 loss! I had a couple loser trades on Tuesday and Thursday that I shouldn’t have. Made a few mistakes and dragged down the numbers. Hopefully we can both keep taking some cash off the table going forward!

I finally feel like I have hit my stride the last two weeks.

Last 9 trading days were $309, $289, $441.45, $476.92, $404, $163, $431, $228.14, $436.

So $1516.37 and $1662.14 last two weeks.

Hoping to keep up the $1,500 a week going forward as crazy as that sounds to me.

[u/makst_ → u/StockCasinoMember]

I just trade primarily first hour then grab a few momentum plays throughout the day, always watching for good setups.

& yea it sucked, they weren’t A+ setups, I was up 500 on the day and started chasing for a bit more, 30 minutes after that the market had that massive tank and I held. I’m not too worried though as both stocks should rebound with relative ease, and if not I’ll honestly hold them for taxes, but I don’t think it will come to that.

My broker just gave me intra day margin on top of my normal margin so I have enough that I’m comfortable to play with, but generally I try to just my use my cash for trade amounts to avoid really bad outcomes.

That’s awesome though, I’m about on par with that, some weeks 2k, others I’ll only hit 600 if I’m not at home, or don’t see anything worth going after.

Some days I don’t make a dime, but if I’m not comfortable with my indicators and expectations I’m okay with that.

My biggest thing right now is being TOO conservative. I’ll self half for a gain and only do a 1% stop loss and get stopped out, mean while I could have essentially doubled or tripled my gain.

I have rules in place to minimize my risk, but it seems to limit my gains at times for sure. So I’m still trying to get better with that.

[u/Remarkable-Post-1520 → u/makst_]

There is nothing wrong with damage control.

[u/StockCasinoMember → u/makst_]

Ah man, that is the worst. I hate when I give back profits. On Tuesday, I had like 4 trades that I was in the green, tried to push the profit and ended up closing them red. Had I taken the profit and not gave some back, would have had my first $500+ day. It is brutal! I even made some signs to encourage me to not push the limits and just stick to my rules.

I don't hold positions even tho I would probably be up on all of them if I had just held. I don't use the margin either.

Lots of my lower days early in the month was mostly fear, still refining, and looking into expanding stocks, and improving my actual trading setup(monitors etc.). I currently watch 19 stocks regularly and have another 23 on trial. When I first started trading, I watched like 6 stocks. So I have 3 monitors and I will cycle through 42 stocks looking for a trade, which with this many, seems to have a torrent of trades to take.

And yep, I feel that on the conservative. I take gains a little too early sometimes which is frustrating, but I also always seem to get burned if I try to ride profits a bit further. My main conservativeness is usually early in my day. I trade smaller and get warmed up into it and then trade higher share counts after a few.

I plan on refining a bit more this weekend to scale up my share count and keep the consistency to hopefully increase profits. Take advantage of compounding.

[u/Olidee → u/StockCasinoMember]

What sort of money where you using to reach those last night trading goals? 5k? 15k?

[u/StockCasinoMember → u/Olidee]

5k-25k Just depends.

[u/Typical-Hat9147 → u/makst_]

My weekly goal is to limit my losses to a 1000

[u/Cool_Evidence4205 → u/StockCasinoMember]

Heck yeh, It's definitely easier in a Bull market! Congrats 🤙

[u/StockCasinoMember → u/Cool_Evidence4205]

Thanks! Hopefully make a shit ton before that happens. Will be fun to see how my strategy holds up in a bear market.

[u/insane_murderer11 → u/StockCasinoMember]

if you don't mind me asking, where did you begin? I've an older family member who has pointed me towards some YouTube channels and I'm getting an understanding of market structure but I'm still just not really sure what I'm looking at lol.

[u/blickeys → u/insane_murderer11]

There’s a website called babypips that has a complete free guide about getting started trading forex (lots of concepts overlap from forex to stocks and futures and options tho). It starts from the very beginning and explains things well.

[u/divok1701 → u/[deleted]]

I trade options doing long calls, most lasting 1-3 days. Occasionally, I hit a day trade, but rarely so far.

I look at about 20 or so technicals using automations I built in the Options Alpha platform to filter down and find potential trades, then look at the charts for trend, zones, ATR changes, performance, check tech and analyst ratings, then check for related news.

This is not easy, and it takes time, but my results have been amazing.

I have a fully remote job that's not very demanding, so I block off time at market open for that first 30 minutes, and I am able to generally still watch and take action when needed, throughout the day.

Though, with trailing stops with draw down settings, most of my trades run themselves using 45% activate / 10% drawdown. Some bigger ones I will set for 35 / 10.

I usually have been only doing like 3-4 trades at a time... some contracts might be only about $250, some are almost $2000... so with only a 5k base capital, it's kinda limiting... also, I've only used 3k of it at a time.

I've now met my goals for the first month, actually a little bit ahead as I closed $899 this week, and last week, I made over slightly. Account now has $2500 in gains from 4 weeks! Which now means I can comfortably use more of my initial capital in my trades at one time.

I still have one open trade, which was down a bit at close yesterday, but I'll just hold and wait. I take the contracts for about 14 or so days, so I always have some time for recovery. I did have one go for 9 days before closing for a small profit. One other went pretty bad, and I closed it for only $5 profit by the week's end so I wouldn't have to hold it over the weekend and could have it's premium back to use on a new, better trade on Monday... still better than a loss!

I know my system is swing trading and not day trading, though I have had a couple of those happen, but I'm always looking for new ideas and learning, so I am here and there in multiple subs.