How I Got Here

First a little background on me, at least in how it relates to trading. I've always been interested in the markets. I can remember that the first time I really had some sort of understanding about stocks and financial markets was around the time of the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. I recall asking my step-father to explain what it meant. It was only a year later that I found myself attending conferences with a childhood friend in San Francisco on investments and investment opportunities. (As an interesting aside, at one such conference a company called Motorola trying to raise investment money for it's newish mobile phone division. They phoned me twice the following week and I had to tell them that it would take quite a bit of allowance money for me to be able to pony up the $2,000 minimum they were asking. What a missed opportunity that was.)

Although I remained interested in investments and markets I only flirted with the idea off and on over the years. Even though I was quite proficient with computers and software development, I was a finance major and attended school at Golden Gate University in the financial district in San Francisco. I studied for my Series 7 with a relatively small brokerage house in Cupertino in the evenings, but decided it wasn't anything I wanted to go through with. (The idea of selling something to someone because it's what I had to offer instead of what was best for their situation didn't appeal to me.)

About 5 years ago I became aware of the retail foreign exchange (forex) currency markets. I read lots of interesting pieces on it, entertained exploring it further, but never did move on it. Somehow, about a year ago, the foreign currency markets crossed my path once again. I don't even recall how it happened, but when it did I knew it was an itch I wanted to scratch.

Ninety Percent of Traders Lose Money

From then until now I've been reading, watching, and studying as much as I can. I've read countless numbers of books, spent hours in forums, and continued to educate myself on economic affects on the forex markets. What I discovered is there is a ton of misinformation in the marketplace. Most of what folks are selling or even giving away is pure bullshit. Like so many financial experts you see on TV, most are just regurgitating what they've heard others say. There's many approaches to being successful in the financial markets. Some prefer to trade on fundamentals, others on technicals, and some just on pure price action. But if it was as easy as trading a 20 day EMA breakout, or some such horseshit, why would any of us work for a living. There's this huge herd mentality and not many are stopping to do their own analysis or homework. It seems that everyone is looking to get rich quick, and yet most are getting broke even faster. There's a sobering statistic in trading: 90% of all traders lose money.

I knew that if I was going to do some trading of my own I didn't want to be part of that 90% and I knew that my best chance for success would involve doing the hard work, testing ideas, and finding someone that was where I wanted to be and getting that person to mentor me. About six months ago a friend introduced me to Phil Newton and his Trading Strategies site. After talking to Phil and reviewing others' personal experiences with Phil, I decided that it would be worthwhile to hook up with someone like Phil, in order to get some guidance in the markets. Phil is the real deal.

The Journey

For the past six months I've been demo trading, developing a trading plan, and continuing to learn as much as I can. I'm not sure where any of this will go, but I always enjoy learning something new, and right now trading is satisfying that desire for me. Maybe at some point I'll be posting charts, making predictions and all the rest of that crap, but until then I'll keep watching, learning, studying, and documenting my journey. For me the journey is really the best part.