Brief Bio
I'm a 27 year-old aspiring trader. I'm currently living in the Bay Area.
Market Background
Like many, I started with technical analysis. I then took a long side tour teaching myself Statistics, Programming, and Machine Learning - I was certain that Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines and their cohorts would be the Holy Grail. (I'm still pretty sure that Recurrent Neural Networks analyzing a host of market internals, and different asset classes would do pretty damned good, but I'd rather trade than spend all day coding... also I'm not a programer!)
Trading Background
My only foray into trading came in July and August of 2011. I'd noticed strong day-to-day mean reversion in volatility ETFs. I deposited $10,000 with Interactive Brokers and was up 40% in less than a week! By the end of the next week, I was down 45% on my starting capital. :pcguru: That led to the previously mentioned MATH detour. During the last few months, I've come to my senses, I hope. I've read a lot of the more successful journals on futures.io (formerly BMT), and am ready to begin building MY own personal approach, rather than wasting all my time on learning statistics and never trading.
Why is this a checklist rather than a journal? Journals are full of drama and emotions, but checklists are boring. Because good trading should be boring. Rather than ever risking going with my gut, or smoking the hope-ium, I'm going to use a series of checklists and logic checks to build my sense of the market and whether I start each month, week, or day with a bearish or bullish bias. Rather than looking for one set of rules, this will be a an ongoing iterative process. If I'm lucky, I'll even help someone else out along the way.