My Journey over the last few years.

Hey all thought I would go a little more in depth here and give a little background and how I overcame some of my hurdles with Binary options trading and Spot trading.

So to start off I am 40, live in Texas. I used to run my own computer consulting company, so if you ever need help with your PC or some advice hit me up. I started my illustrious career in FOREX in 2008, a friend of mine talked me into getting into trading, told me it was easy just pick up or down and then sell it when you have some profit. Well I gave it a try 4 times depositing 5,000 dollars each time. Each time I would actually make a nice profit then get aggressive and lose it. I really could not believe that i could not get a grasp on this whole trading thing and that I was losing. I considered my self and intelligent person, and until I blew 20, 000 my ego would not let me see I had no freaking clue what I was doing. I just thought like a lot of things in life I could figure it out. The one thing that did happen though is I fell in love with trading, and promised myself I would succeed. From July of 2008 until roughly the beginning of 2010, I started reading, watching DVDs, and forming an Idea of how I wanted to trade. My main weakness is patience, so I focused on building a toolset to scalp intraday reversals. From February of 2010 to June I didn't really lose money but I did not really make any either, I had pretty much lost all confidence in myself. I did during this time refine my system and started to develop a set of rules to trade by to help me overcome my fear of losing again, so it was not all wasted time. I actually ran across Banc De Binary by accident when looking for a new FOREX broker, and I really like the idea and simplicity of Binary options. Plus trading BIN reversals was right up my alley.

That began my career in trading Binary Options. My ego once again got in the way, although my “system” I was using was helping me to have some good weeks my trading was all over the place I was lacking consistency and had no form of money management. But since once a month I would do a small withdrawal I felt like I was doing well. By the end of the year I realized something was missing and I would not make it trading how I currently was. The mistake I made then was blaming my lack of success on my ITM %, and not my blatant disregard for any kind of money management. Me being a technical person I decided to analyze my trades by time. So I would enter each trade I took into an Excel spreadsheet that was divided into 24 hours. (I was kinda of a trading addict back then, I wanted to be successful so bad.) The Spreadsheet did actually help me out quite a bit and I developed my trading schedule. Which by my spreadsheet was 2 hours after London open 4:00am till about 10:00am CST. Even with the slight improvement in my ITM % I was still not “making it”.

My last breakthrough came when I bitched on Facebook how frustrated I was, and a friend of mine Mauricio answered back. He basically told me I was an idiot and until I came up with some kind of Money Management plan I would never succeed unless I was hitting 100% ITM every day or Hell froze over.
Somewhere around this time I switched over to 24Option due to higher payouts, as the light bulb finally went off when he sat down and showed me that I really only needed about 65% ITM to make a some money. Once again I was back to the drawing board to come up with a plan for Money Management that worked with my style of trading. I ended up with a 1%, 3%, 5% plan. Nothing groundbreaking and if I would not have been so hard headed something I should have been using since day one.

This brings me up to about June of 2011, my account was about $600.00 from the original $5000.00, I had revenge traded, and martingaled it into almost nothing. From June till November, I stuck to my trading times as well as I could, I followed my rules to the T, and used proper money management for the first time in my trading career, my account began to slowly grow. Nothing spectacular but by November I was finally making enough to do regular withdrawals. This was probably not my best decision in the world but I decided to go full time trading right before the holiday markets set in. If you have ever traded in December you know what I mean. December was a rough month and really made me question my decision to go full time trading, but I stuck to my plan and made it thru, was not a pretty month but I learned a lot.

2012 was pretty much a blur, I did keep refining my system and was prepared for the “summer months” so even though I was trading a lot less It did not stress me out. A few highlights of 2012 I gave NADEX a try and hated it. I did start scalping the majority of my BIN trades that the spread and avg candle movement allowed. (I will go more into that in another post). And I fell in love with News Straddles. (I will cover those also in another post). I switched brokes once again to Markets World, at the time they had some very nice 95% payouts.

Let me try and sum everything up.

1. Put together a trading plan that covers:
a. Trading times.
b. Money Management
2. Find a strategy that suits you, short term or long term trades, Trend trading or
trading reversals. Be patient wait for the trades to come to you.
3. Review your trades each and every day, you learn way more from your mistakes.

Don't lose faith, if you want it bad enough you can make it happen, just be open minded and don't ignore others advice. I did and it probably took me twice as long to get where I should be now.

The Holy Grail of Trading is not a system or an indicator it is you.