And I'm Back...

Hello again friend. Yes, it's been a long time since my last post and no, I'm not dead. Although I could go into great detail about what's been going on for the past few months, and trust me, it's been an exciting time, the details are tedious at times, boring and rather unrelated to the purpose of this blog. In short, I allowed many pursuits of varying importance take me away from trading. However, I'm back and am moving forward with renewed energy and a modicum of wisdom.

The main thing I've been confronted with is the idea of finding a way to create a sustainable schedule. You may have noticed, wondered or otherwise mused about my ability to sustain such a full schedule. Between full time work, music gigs and teaching, a failed love interest, learning about Trading, Stocks, Options, Market Theory, and blogging multiple times a week I was on a quick path to burnout. Eventually all of it caught up to me and I found myself spread too thin, out of energy, in poor health, mentally and physically exhausted and otherwise not leading a healthy, balanced life. I've rearranged my schedule, learned how to say no to competing interests and am holding myself to a schedule with blocks of time dedicated to trading. And not to worry, I'll continue to add to this blog at least once a week to keep you kind folks abreast of what's current.

For those of you who have been longtime readers of my blog, I feel I need to give you an update on the trade journaling software that I've dubbed ScoreCard. The vision is not dead, far from it. The vision is even clearer than ever. Unfortunately the first team of software developers I was working with fell apart. This did cause a bit of angst on my part and has certainly contributed to my silence on the subject. I've managed to regroup and establish new connections and a new group of talented programmers to make this vision a reality. ScoreCard is much more than a glimmer in my eye, stay tuned for future postings.

Thanks for sticking with me, audience. I will continue to bring you as much insight as I can. The story is definitely not over, and the best is yet to come.

Where I've Been

I know I've dissappeared recently, at least as far as this blog is concerned. I've been reflecting. I've also been making plans. But first, I think you should know on what I've been reflecting. As a few estitute readers have mentioned, I can be a little hard on myself from time to time. I have quite a lot of drive and desire to be the best, yet I know I'm new to trading and therefore am the worst I will ever be. That's the good news. The bad part is that it can be a bit frustrating & discouraging.

I have not been placing trades (not even virtual) for the past couple weeks. Why not? Good question. It's not that I'm that discouraged, it's just a matter of me wanting a better trade journaling platform in order to get quantifyable, objective results. I was using Trade Tracker Online (www.TradeTrackerOnline.com) to journal my trades, but the free 30 day period expired. I was introduced to TTO by Jordan Stokes. It's a decent trade journaling/tracking program and I was excited to use it because I haven't found any other worthwhile pieces of software or services out there for trade journaling.

As you know from reading my previous posts, keeping a trade journal is an essential habbit of a professional trader. I started with free-form text & chart captures (in Microsoft Word) but now find it too limiting because it lacks an easy way to quantify the trades. I can also maintain a spreadsheet with my entry & exit numbers and get some basic metrics of my success rate. Unfortunately that means entering the data twice. I don't know about you, but I hate double data entry, not to mention the fact that this still only offers a very broad indication of the results of your trades. Trade Tracker Online does a much better job by offering a platform which helps you evaluate a trade and record entry, stop adjustments, profit taking & exit. This avoids double data entry, and gives you the benefit of looking through your journal for you best & worst trades helping you to fine-tune your trading rules and trading style.

As you may recall, I'm a computer programmer and naturally I'd already been mentally designing a trade journal database. Initially when I saw Trade Tracker Online I thought: Cool! A solution that I can put to use today, rather than having to spend the time to develop my own. After all, my goal is to be a professional trader, not a computer programmer or database designer. I've been programming professionally since the turn of the century and I'm a little bored of it. Trading is more interesting to me, not to mention that the income from trading is scalable based on the amount of money you have in your trading account, not on the amount of hours you can sell of yourself in a given day (assuming you're an employee or contractor, of course).

As nice as Trade Tracker Online is, it doesn't offer the level of insight that I'd like to see. I have some very specific ideas of how to create a better trade journaling platform and have assembled a team of programmers to help me create my vision. I don't want to give away too much about what we're developing before it's ready for public release, but it will provide a trader with far more insight than anything else out there that I've seen. I'm very excited to be creating this solution and can't wait to tell you more about it. Until it's finished with the phase 1 release I won't have time to be trading. It is a related discipline though, and I won't be far from the markets.