Reminiscences of An Amateur Daytrader
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This blog post was originally published on my blog, but I think it is interesting and wanted to share it on Medium as well.
I have always been fascinated by traders. I have been following Trendtraderen (the trend trader) on Twitter for a while and I really liked his Twitter posts.
Not long ago he did a trending experiment and commented on the experiences. Since he does not have a blog I thought it would be great to have him do a guest post here so you all could read about it.
I find it really interesting to see how an amateur trader acts and thinks. Enjoy.
Guest post from Trendtraderen:
I’ve been trading actively for 4 years now but started to buy some paper-shares 5 years ago. For 18 months now I have been day-trading, and I wanted to publish a 4-week window on my Twitter account, where I published every single trade plus my loss or profits that day.
I even wrote some smaller thoughts about how the day went, my emotions, and why I traded it. I started with 2810,69$. My goal was not to lose money and to sit with a feeling of mastery. Here is how it went:
First Week
As you can see on the picture under, I lost about 25% of my account within 5 tradingdays. Ouch.
This was mostly because of my emotions. On Monday I lost 100$, which is nothing dramatic. On Tuesday, I tried to make the arrows green after losing 100$ on Monday, so I had a bit of FOMO and greed. Because of this, I lost 1003$ on Tuesday.
After 2 days of trading, I had lost about 40% of my account. This had to be the worst start. Especially when I shared everything on Twitter as well. I tried to hit the “reset” button, and it worked. Kinda.
Making Money!
On Wednesday I made money! $235.96 to be exact.
On Thursday I made money! 90$! Woho!
On Friday I made money! 266$!! Now I really felt I had a comeback.
Even though I had lost overall, I still felt great, because I had 3 green days in a row, and followed my plan. In the last 3 days, I had a sense of mastery and joy. I was going into my first week, with 585$ less than I started with, but…
