3 years of learning with you – Thank you
I thought I would share my 3 year story, and lessons learned with you.
Today, I have a great side business, day trading along with you (and team). However, it did not come with extremely low lows, and high highs. Now that I feel somewhat more experienced, I realize that the journey I went through is not atypical.
I started with Bear Bull Traders in 2019. I sought to learn a new skill. So with $30k, I read your book, opened an IBKR account, paid for a membership to BBT, and started my journey. No active trading experience – total newbie using a paper trading account.
In the first week, after a couple incredible days trading opening range breakups, I switched to an active account. And low and behold, within a very short period of time, I was approaching 200% gains, on top of the world, and telling myself I had cracked this code.
However, My risk management was lacking, I was taking extremely high risk trades, and had little respect for managing that downside risk. Of course, as a result, I was making a large amount of gains, in short amounts of time. But then the inevitable happened – When only a couple bad moves resulted in an almost total loss – I realized – I had not cracked this, and I was doing something horribly wrong.
And this was where I went back to a paper trading account. Attended more webinars and watched more training videos. Trading scared me now, and I was timid – too timid. I documented my risk management rules, and documented all of my failures. What did I learn from them, why did I make certain moves, and I analyzed these lessons. The next time I encountered that heart fluttering moment, when I thought a certain move was a clear winner, I pulled out my rules, and stuck to them. It is in this way, that when I make a mistake (that it didn’t cost me everything).
As a result, I slowly started to pull myself out of my hole. It was slower than I was used to, because of my rules, but, it was consistent, and predictable. The result was that I still came out net positive for the first year of my new little business, but, it was not as good as I had hoped it would be. 2019 was my year of learning.
The following year, I consistently followed my rules, and slowly, and surely, made a sizable second salary for my household. This consistency, however, was built off of an insane quantity of trades. I was over trading, and getting extremely tired as a result. The amount of mental energy was taxing. It was at this moment that I realized that in each given day, only a few moves present themselves. I should not be trading for the sake of trading – I should be searching for the predictable patterns that I have studied. I dropped my trades down to 1 or 2 a day, and, also followed my rules each time.
And as you can see, 2021 has resulted in a YTD gain that may even exceed my day jobs income. And all off a couple hours a day work.
You have built a great business and I want to show you my appreciation, and share my lessons that I have learned over the last 3 years. I attached some TraderVue reports that can show you that journey that I went through.
Jody Paterson
