My Week So Far
Well, it all started good enough
very early Tuesday morning [Monday being a Holiday
and not worth even looking at except for the weekly open figure], but went
downhill very fast. If we could somehow trade “frustration & failure”
futures, I’d be long about 1000 contracts by now.
I got to my computer screen about
1 A.M. Tuesday morning, and since very little was happening, I went into the
kitchen to make some breakfast. Not content with cereal or just toast, I
decided to make a real breakfast; veggie omelet with bacon on the side and some
honey wheat toast with raspberry jam.
One nanosecond after the bacon hit the frying
pan the dog was underneath my feet.
[Yea, OK, I’ll throw a couple of strips on here for you – I
got you covered.]
When I’m finished I put my
meal on the kitchen table with my laptop and turned around to grab a paper
towel from the sink. No paper towels, so I walk around the corner to the pantry
and grabbed another roll of paper towels. I’m like 2 seconds removed from the
table; I turn the corner and my meal is gone; omelet, bacon, toast nada,
zip, zero, and zilch; sitting on the chair licking his chops is the
dog.
I walk over and say, putting my
thumb and forefinger very close together, “you
know, I came this close to majoring in taxidermy in college.”
However, this is what the dog
hears;
Great! I’ll Have Seconds &
Then We Play
Once I’m settled in, nothing is
happening in gold. As the hours go by I am growing increasingly frustrated with
the price action. By 9:30 – 9:45 A.M. my head is ready to explode; we got maybe
3 to 3 ½ hours to go until the close and all I’ve seen the last 9 hours is “up
a buck, down a buck” price action.
I can’t take it anymore; I throw
the laptop on my desk and head out with the dog for a very long walk. When I
come back about 4 hours later I see what happened about 5 minutes after I left
and then into the close.
Am I frustrated? Yup.
Have I failed? Yup.
Will I fail again in the future?
Yup.
Do I care? Nope, not as long as
there isn’t any actual money lost by my stupidity.
Maybe it was the tides, the
astrological alignments, or the trading Gods who for some reason were angry with
me. Simply put, I couldn’t take another minute looking at that screen without
putting my fist through it.
So, I missed a nice $15 move down
[that expanded the weekly range], that the algo caught by the way, from my
stupidity.
Now, I’m going to tell you why
most people can’t handle being professional traders; it’s because they can’t effectively deal with
frustration and failure.
Forget winning, and all that goes
with it, for just one second. Any chimp can handle winning trades.
How do you handle all the missed opportunities, ill conceived trades, and too
early/late liquidations? Do the woulda shoulda’s crawl under your skin and
bother you?
For most people they do. If you
have never been in a trading pit, you can’t begin to realize how much abuse
other traders intentionally throw at you to get you off your game; it’s
non-stop throughout the entire day.
In other words, it’s a life of
frustration and failure; and that’s with a winning algorithm!! Can you imagine
what it’s like for others in the game?
You live your trading life like a duck;
water hits you and it runs right off you like nothing ever happened.
Have a great day everyone.
-vegas
