After graduating college in May of '09 I was absolutely elated to be finished. I thought to myself, "Now I can actually get paid for the work I do." Nevermind the fact that part of the reason I was always behind was that I got distracted reading whatever looked interesting on the shelves beside my lonely study cubbies. So I went to work for my father, a lawyer, as an assistant and sometimes IT person. The majority of the work, however, was answering phones. Man I hated being a receptionist. I was too ADD to be really good at it, I lack the patience necessary to deal kindly with folks who need lawyers in their lives, and I got pissed off whenever the phone rang and interrupted whatever it was I happened to be studying at the time.
A few months passed by and I began to become melancholy from not being able to find a job. I started looking, a few jobs a day at first, and then after several months, all I did was hunt for jobs.
I am happy that I studied a broad range of subjects, especially Philosophy and the Social Sciences, but it was my Financial Economics degree that I wanted to put to use. I focused on applying for anything that was even remotely related to finance, banking, or economics. Nothing. Then one day my fiancee` suggested I try Craig's List, because "they are posting jobs that they need to fill right now."
I had immediate success. I got an interview in Wilmington, which I eventually turned down (for a ridiculous Instant Message Miscommunication). I also got an interview with a Proprietary Stock Trading Firm. After the second interview, and after learning a little about what it would involve, I knew I was hungry to get into it. Later that week, I logged in to the online training room, and began the month long process.
Skip forward a month and a half, and hear I am, I've got my computer set up and I've been trading for a little more than a week. At first, my fingers were fat and sticky with sweat, hitting the wrong keys, getting nervous and switching positions, and just basically getting my butt handed to me. But each day I've been getting a little better.
I remember my first short, my boss was screaming at me through an IM, and I panicked and sold out too early. "WTF?" was the response in the IM. So I pile back in, get yelled at again (b/c now its time to exit the trade), and accidentally hit one of my "take" keys twice and short it right as the market moves upward. And as my boss put it, who's a real sharp dude, "You were there! You were going to make your first winning trade, make some real f****n coin, and you reached down and grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!" I don't think my heart quit beating for an hour.
In my mind, I'm making steady progress. You would think day trading is all about thinking, and to some extent it is, but it's actually much more about intuition and knowing how to react decisively. It's more akin to an expensive Chess game than, say, a timed crossword puzzle. So, of course I'm still making mistakes; but I've learned to be calm, to try and control emotion, and hold on to winning trades for as long as one possibly can without screaming at the top of his lungs.
The screw up today, the one I really wanted to write about, wasn't my fault. Sure, I screwed up afterward on my own accord, but this one just halved my winnings for the day. I had to have a procedure on my leg, from an old martial arts injury, and so I have my trading monitors positioned to my right, and I'm leaning back in to a recliner (so I can keep my foot elevated). Now, one of my cats, a young, friendly, 12 pound Orange Tom Cat, runs inside when my landlord comes in the house to fix something. And he just wants to be petted, or to sit on my lap like he usually does. Unlike other times, when I'm just chilling watching TV or something, I'm not actively trading a volatile stock with my keyboard in my lap and the F-Keys set to buy and sell large positions of stocks. So I try to deflect him once, but he won't be denied that easily, and he jumps right my knee and on F6! I knock him off, try to cover my position that I thought I just missed, and breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn't ruined.
Then I noticed my Profit/Loss ratio doesn't look as good as it should.... I still had a huge position I had not even known I put on! Lost just about everything I had made that day! I was able to come back a little, but I was so mad at the little kitty! But I won't be able to stay mad long, poor Sunny didn't know what the heck I was doing, he just wanted to say "hi".
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