A New Beginning

Thank you so much, everyone who has left kind and uplifting notes for me.

I have been doing quite a bit of thinking about certain patterns that I observed in my trading.

Now, how and where do I even begin?

Most of you would have noticed by now that I don't "talk to" you. I write as if I'm talking to myself, and for as long as I'm typing, I'm able to forget that there are those out there who know me and those who don't, who are going to be reading what I've written, coz I've never developed that kind of confidence to "address an audience".

But maybe that's a good thing for you.

Because I'm able to block you out when I write, you always get what I'll call my "raw" thoughts - unsophisticated, earthy, ok maybe sometimes even septic - and a complete picture of my trading activities and performance on a daily basis. Depending on your reason for coming in here, you reap different benefits from reading about what I lay out here publicly: my life - both as a trader, and as someone who is at her very core an extreme human hater.

My thoughts are always not well-organized, always in jumbles, so I'm sorry I'm going to have to ask you to just do your best to follow along.

I want to talk about how I first got into trading.

After having worked in a bank for 3 years, and in public service (police) for 7, I decided that I've had enough of having to deal with people day in and day out. Face-to-face interaction with humans drains me in a way that's difficult for me to describe. I was always ill - migraine attacked me once every other day - and I felt like my life was going to be cut short if I continued to work in environments that require me to see and talk to people.

So, I took a permanent break from work, and enrolled myself in all sorts of courses just to see if I could find something that I could LOVE doing for the rest of my life. I've even attended NLP (neurolinguistic programming) "bootcamps", where I learned to condition my brain to not freak out at the sight of COCKROACHES. Ha!

Anyway, one of the courses I took was a 5-session basic trading course, some time in late 2007. Without any banking and finance background, or any knowledge or interest in investment and trading before, needless to say, I had a hard time in class. Everyone else seemed to have had some kind of trading experience - some were there after having been badly burnt dabbling in stocks, others had been "conned" by some PHD (???) in Options and lost a fortune trading his system that promised 7000% (along that line) returns. In a nutshell, everyone else knew the difference between stocks and forex, what support and resistance meant, they knew their MACDs and MAs, and what nots. Me? I was just CLUELESS.

But I love those candles, and was fascinated by indicators. So after "graduating" from the course, I began on a hunting spree for books and blogs on indicators especially. I played around with them, memorized those candlestick patterns with the strangest names, and started paper trading FOREX and options. I had mixed results, and had a hard time understanding and appreciating the relevance of indicators. I started reading up on chart patterns, Elliot Waves, Fib, and started to notice how everyone's basically saying the same thing, but just in different "languages". I read heaps of other books while paper trading at the same time, completely forgetting about the other things that I had wanted to pick up - spanish, italian, dancing, etc.

After being on the simulator for 6 months, I went live. That was the time that I began to blog again after having shut down my blog for 6 months. Blogging was the other thing that was very new to me then. I put up my first blog post in Jan 2008 - it was a strange experience. I should mention that it was Seabloke who INSPIRED me to start a blog. I was at her place once, and she was sitting on the floor playing with her Mac. I took a peep at what she was doing, and then burst out laughing. I couldn't believe my baby sister had become a blogger - the type that we used to make fun of all the time. Anyway, I was in an adventurous mode then, so I gave it a shot. I think I posted less than a dozen posts before I shut it down 2 months later.

End May 2008 was a new beginning for me - I started blogging actively, and trading live.

The rest's history.

As I was saying, I have been thinking a lot about my trading. What I noticed was that while posting my results did help a little initially, it has caused more harm than good as I progressed. I will not go into the details for now, and will talk more in future posts. Suffice to say that the pressure of having to maintain positive days had caused me to do on many occasions what I usually do when I feel I'm being "controlled" - I self-destruct. All I need is the trivialest of event, a minor irritant, to detonate.

Some call this phenomenon "fear of success". I'm not sure that's what I'm dealing with. If anything, I WANT success, I THIRST for success, and I want to be successful in trading more than I ever wanted anything else.

So, I really don't know what this is about. And I don't wish to dwell on it. What I'm interested in is the "HOW", not the "WHY". I want to know how to stop this vicious cycle of self-sabotaging. So I'm going to start changing some of my routines - among which is the keeping tabs of my daily results. Not only am I going to stop posting them, I'm going to stop recording them.

I am aware that I'll be losing the majority of you who have come in here daily to check out that green/red figure at the end of a trading day. But that's not going to be a regret to me. I have made friends here, and I believe that you will still drop by now and then to say 'Hi'. And that's good enough for me. I've never been one who loves attention from strangers. I cherish friendships, and I actually love to help (surprise!!!). True friends and emails telling me that I've helped in a certain way jolt my heart back to life. Hence, moving forward, this will be the purpose of my blog: to connect with others who are passionate about trading.

I'm not sure yet how I'm going to be doing it. I will definitely not be posting my daily PnL. I will, however, continue to post charts, and whenever I do, I'll post the trading log as well. I think it is important (if my purpose is to help) that people can trust that those are really trades that I've taken - since I haven't earned any credentials yet. I will be posting both winning and losing trades - anything that has some learning values in them.

I might also start posting about how I go about planning my trades, and a bunch of other stuff. I don't know for sure yet.

I will most certainly be writing a lot more on non-trading matters - maybe even some haunting past. For all I know, maybe someday this will come in handy - e.g.when I decide to write a memoir. Afterall, I did have a very dramatic and colorful history.... I could even write a novel based on my life...but I'll have to kill D first since he doesn't actually know everything there's to know about me YET. 16 years with him and I managed to keep my dark secrets to myself...I deserve a medal.

Anyway, this is NOT a farewell post. I never do farewells. When I'm gone, I'm just gone.

This is just the beginning. And I hope that by May 2010, I can finally tell you that I'm confident that I'm on the right track. What I have in mind is not merely a goal. I have a vision, and I'm afraid that for now, only one person will know.

Ziad (SURPRISE!!!!).

Going back to save my trade now.