Journey to Bankruptcy or Financial Freedom

1. I do not want to spend my life working. I do not need a huge stack of cash to enjoy life, and would rather spend my time on hobbies where I am my own boss than at a high paying job.

2. I can manage my cash as well as “professional” brokers. The catalyst that began my journey was after watching my “professionally managed” $45,000 investment account at Charles Schwab continuously decline to a meager $3,000 between 2011 and 2015. I figured I can do at least that good, so I moved my funds over to an account I now manage and have started trading myself.

Totally agree. Lose sight of the money, and perfect your techniques.

Just to go a bit further and excuse me for stating what might be obvious -
Ignoring the money sounds counter-intuitive because the problem is how to make money and through our education and normal professional work we are taught to know more and more about a problem in order to solve it - the problem is your enemy.

But in trading the market, the charts, news, prices, other traders, volatility etc. etc. are not your enemy - your enemy is yourself and his weapon is temptation to make decisions with emotion - meaning either greed or fear (possibly the same thing anyway). You have to conquer your own enemy - yourself - and the measure of success in this campaign is through discipline to adhere to a developed strategy, not the monetary outcome.

Sorry to jump on someone else's thought train but I really respect Dr. Toad's process and discipline - this already places him/her on the fringe of success.

Thanks to all for the advice and best wishes. You are both correct that I should set my initial target at following the plans I set out. Fortunately for me I have a leg up on most people in this respect...I am very methodical by nature.

In fact, the main lessons I learned from my first month were:
- Have a plan going in
- Do not deviate from the plan
- Do not trade on emotion

The not trading on emotion will be simple for me with my plans in place since the only decisions I will make is which trades to enter in on. These trades will only be from the approximately 1-15 that meet my current screens each day. The screens are purely statistically driven, so I am only allowing a small amount of emotion to select from the valid options.

Since one of my main failures in the first month was decisions based on emotion, I see value in not doing this. Also since I already lost 42k in investments (catalyst to me taking charge of it myself), a large portion of the fear has been taken out of me, the only barrier I may have is greed.

The Pangolin-Z system has a target profit and a stop loss, so as long as I adhere to that, there will be no emotion driven decisions. So far so good with that one.

The BB Squeeze and Aroon Cross systems have no set targets, but a set method to move the stop loss, so no emotional driven decisions in these systems as well as long as the plan is stuck to. Still in the early testing stages for this, but I do not forsee myself deviating from the plans after seeing what happens when I do that in the first month.


In reviewing my initial plan, I did discover a flaw with my money management rules. I have limits for how large of a position I should take, but the initial plan did not have any rules for how much total risk my trading pot will be subjected to. For this reason, I am adding 2 more rules (c and d) to help prevent a month with greater than a 5% decline in my trading pot. I will be closely monitoring the risk of my trading pot for the next month to make sure the percentages I am setting right now make sense, so they may be modified slightly in the future.

I followed the criterion set in my system of keeping my stop just below the next higher low. As a bit of an aside, this does look like it might be a good long term play. If you look at the MA200 it is starting to go up at a quicker rate. It looks like there is a good S/R level at around 60, so I don’t expect it will be going much south of that and this might be a good time to buy in for a long term position. The company does not match my criterion for a long term trade though (high F score) so I will not be doing this.