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| My Journey, Illusions and Discoveries as a Trader (5th Jan 2007) - Written by Kelvin Chan |
This article is written to show how one trader started and the experiences he had. After reading it, you can also discuss about the article
This is daunting to begin with … but every journey begins with a single step so here goes. I actually started with some options trading seminar way back in January 2005 and learnt the basics of charting there. This was then followed by some weeks of paper trading. Inconsistent paper trading though … did not do it every week.
By the time I got to May I had somehow chanced and learnt about Forex and its advantages over the other markets (liquidity, leverage, 24/7, etc). Started demo trading on Oanda’s FXGame.
On 2nd June, I rushed into opening a trading account with Oanda with just $50 because I wanted to trade the NFP that very day. Wasn’t able to get in on limit entries and so I started chasing the market. In 3 separate trades, I caught 32 pips in all. Not bad huh?! Too bad I traded only at 2 measly cents per pip … LOL! =)
Things then went pretty downhill from here. I made just about every mistake there is to make as a rookie: |
- Traded on other people’s tips/advice/opinions
- Overtrading
- Trading without a stop loss
- Trading to gain back losses immediately (revenge trading)
- Getting real emotional (Roller-coaster ride to say the least)
- Trading for fear of losing potential profit (A.K.A chasing the market)
- Unwilling to take a loss and move on
- Trading just for the sake of trading
- Not having a target exit based on either number of pips or price level
- Telling myself market will reverse when charts don’t support that view
- Not having an effective strategy for news trading
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And finally at the end of June, I find myself with an account balance of about $15. Hey, in absolute dollars, that’s only a loss of $35 but it’s a loss of 70% of initial capital. I told myself then that this will not stop me and that I’ll keep learning, trying and improving myself. After all, that was just my first month.
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