positiveIn the last two posts I’ve been talking about our goal to finish the month positive. No pun intended. Well, good news this month, most of us have had some really solid, consistent results, and if no surprises, we will end the month positive. But it hasn’t been easy.
March didn’t start that well at all. It was a continuation of “one step back” story from last month. We’ve been hearing that is was a tough month to trade futures, but it wasn’t a comforting excuse.
Taking loses is never easy. In sport, coaches often say that you learn more in defeat and little when you win. Well let me tell you, at the beginning of March we were learning a lot! After some solid advice from our head trader, it was time to knuckle down, tighten up our defense, and get control of our trades, one trade at a time. It was time to get back to the basics. Our head trader got strict with us and started dishing out some tough love, stern words, days off for breaking rules or having losers that were too big. It sucked. Are we ever going to see results?
Then low and behold, many of us stopped losing money in the second week. It was subtle, but noticeable. One of our market wizards says some like “you gotta learn how to lose before you can win” or something like that. Well a few of us stopped losing. And then the ticks started adding up for a couple of us and then the rest of us started “catching” it too. I had a few decent winners every few days which were really inspiring, but I also continued to grind out my daily winners too which all added up at the end of the week. I can do this!
The third week in March was particularly good for all of us. Every day after our markets close we review our trading with the head trader. That week we would bring the sheets (and our smiles) for review and it was green, green, and green, often in every product. We were on a roll.
In the past our head trader would frequently talk to us about turning the corner, the point where a trader goes from losing every day, to not losing so much, to breaking even, to making consistent ticks. Back then it seemed a distant improbability for us. We would lose piles of ticks and our P&L charts were in nose dive piano dropping out the window free fall. But in time, step by step, by doing all the small things, by getting control of each trade, our results have started to added up, and we are finally looking at positive months.
It’s been encouraging, but as we’ve learned over the past six months, there is not much time to celebrate. Every day is a new day in the futures trading business. Our next goal is to start trading more size and to start hitting our monthly targets to go live.
Stay tuned and read more about our progress and what's new with trading futures in Croatia in the next blog post.