u/FrumpyFollicle

I've basically been locked in my room studying 35-40 hours a week on top of working a full time job since early March. For a couple weekends in a row, I spent 20-25 hours just studying big movers or running a historical screener and replaying charts on TradingView bar-by-bar on hundreds of stocks I was unfamiliar with, practicing entries and stop placements and trying to figure out ways to systemically raise stops. I've watched tens of hours of Quallamaggie videos and Youtube interviews with successful traders. I'm on my 11th book on trading since the end of February.

I have some background that makes me feel like is speedrunning my learning curve. I work in corporate finance, which although the investment advice that gets passed around in those circles is garbage that I had to un-learn (buy the dip, DCA, buy low sell high), has me focused on running my trading operation like a business with a focus on continuous process and efficiency improvements. I never made a trade until I had a sort of hypothesis and wrote down rules tailored to my hypothesis. I'm on my 6th edition of rules now and it has changed dramatically since my first batch of trades. I learn so much in a week that sometimes I could realistically revise my rules every few days, but I have a control in place that I can only implement changes over the weekend to help avoid reactionary/emotional decisions. I got into poker for a while back around covid and thus I have an understanding of probabilities, expected value, etc. I understand variance is part of the game. I know the importance of betting heavily on your best hands and folding your worst. Sometimes you need to be patient and sit out dozens of hands in a row. I've had a lot of interest in PR/propaganda/cognitive bias and done a lot of reading on those things, and I consciously identify when I'm getting emotional and starting to experience the gambler's fallacy, confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy, etc. It also made How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market resonate with me quite a bit given how Darvas completely ignored/didn't have access to news and I see how financial "news" is designed to manipulate fear and greed.

Something that stuck with me from Charlie Munger's book which I read a few years ago is his "invert, always invert" thought process. He gave an example of when he was in the military doing something related to studying weather to guide airplanes. He said he always thought, "how do I kill these guys the fastest?" and then avoided those things. I have a list of "how to lose a lot of money" (don't set stops, add to losing positions, follow tips, go against the trend, etc.) that I compile based on what I read. I continuously update the list and specifically avoid doing these things.

Maybe most importantly, I had a 3-4 year addiction to Dota 2. I sucked at that game and could not get any better. It's a complicated game because there's like 150 playable characters, 5 different roles, dozens of different items which means the variations of games are basically endless. On top of complex mechanics, it's ultimately a strategy game. Eventually I paid for coaching and learned how to focus on one role, one character, one build and get really good at it, watch replays of my games and identify mistakes and just focus on correcting the one thing that is holding me back the most. Take full responsibility for games that I lose instead of ever allowing myself to blame teammates or circumstances. Consciously think about improving one thing every game until it's fixed and then find the next thing to improve. I'm applying those principles of how to improve every day to trading. I focus on one strategy and I'm trying to become the best I can be at it.

My first month 4/14-5/15 I made 14 trades with 7 winners averaging 21% including four positions I'm currently holding (+20% 5/5, +12% 5/6, +18% 5/13,+7% 5/15) 7 losers averaging -8% including a rather unfortunate entry and stop loss on TRT 5/14 (if I hadn't gotten stopped I'd be up ~60% in two days on that one. Tuition fee for valuable lessons on entries and initial stops).

I'm alternating between feeling like this is beginner's luck, 99% of traders fail, nobody's profitable in their first two years, easy market to trade in with the AI theme and earnings season coming out of a correction. At the same time, I doubt 99% of traders put in the work I do and have my approach to continuous improvement and my general focus/passion on this. I go to bed on Friday telling myself I'll take it easy this weekend and go do something else, then I wake up early on Saturday excited and all I can think about is something related to improving my trading process or backtesting some idea. Then I'm locked in for 12+ hours other than when I force myself away to go outside or exercise for a bit and get some good food. Plus, it seems like risk management is a primary weakness of new traders and I consider it to be one of my "natural" strengths. Today is the first time since my obsession started that I feel like there's no more rules to tweak for now and it's time to shift my focus to continuing to read/learn and start focusing on discipline and 100% adherence to my rules to execute my strategy and collect a good sample size of my own trading data.

I'm not sure how long this initial success will last, I don't know if/how well my current strategy (swing/position trading breakouts) will hold up when the market gets weaker. I'm not sure whether to believe I'm in the beginner's luck stage or if I'm experiencing something more like imposter syndrome. I won't be fully confident until I have a larger sample size of data. But I do know it's possible to make a lot of money trading and I do know that I will be successful eventually. Anyone else experience a time in their trading journey when they realized that they were going to succeed? I don't feel like anyone I know would be supportive or able to relate.