trading for a living, page-66

Sagitar,

I think you'll find that there are a few on this thread who now trade for a living full time... so the consequences can be quite good....

However, there can be a downside, and take the following as verbatim...hopefully a fairly unique case, though I have heard of similar though possibly less drastic happenings for people who now trade for a living and are fantastic and relaxed at it...

My first attempt at going full time occurred after I received a totally unexpected windfall 6 figure sum some years ago... I had already been dabbling in the market, with mixed success, purely equities, and with only a single short T/a course under my belt...

I left my job, and began to trade in earnest... I did okay, but had very little clues, and made a lot of money for my broker, and slowly grew my account, employed a friend to help me (bad idea in retrospect, lol) working stupid hours without really knowing what I was doing.

I went deeper and deeper into cycle and time theory amongst others, and began to freak out with the "answers" that I was seeing in the markets. At this stage my friend had already lost it and gone on a week long bender. I pushed myself harder and harder, trying to grasp the "hidden patterns" of the market. It culminated in me not sleeping, eating or drinking for one straight week, while I turned my house into a web of charts and theories writing on butcher paper stuck to the walls, with sticky notes and bits of string and pathways to help me follow my ramblings. Very similar to the concoctions shown in the film "A Beautiful Mind".

Needless to say, I had a serious psychotic episode, spent an entire night and day "arguing with God" and successfuly proving via logic that there was no way I could be the second coming of Jesus, so go away and find another patsy, and finally, thanks be, I was found by my at the time Fiancee, who called my sister, who managed to get the cops and an ambulance around and got me into a psych ward, where I languished for a fortnight, teaching swordfighting and self-defence techniques to a bunch of serious nutters, and learning the joys of anti-psychotic drugs, how our mental health system works, as well as sleeping a lot and losing a sheet load of money as I had a lot of positions open without stop losses during a corrective time of the market.

Thanks to some good work by my sis and fiancee, I managed to get discharged and spent a year getting fat, stuck to my couch, learning about depression, and slowly losing any semblence of self-confidence. After that I spent another year weaning off the drugs, learning about my condition, and slowly getting back to some semblence of normalcy. I then re-entered the workforce and after two more years pretty much came good, and back to a relatively self-confidant and far more balanced person than I ever was before.

The last year I have spent studying t/a again, experimenting and first learning how to read charts in my own way, and then learning how to trade what I have learnt.

I am within reach of going back to full time trading, certainly a different man from the first time I tried, a far more relaxed and happy individual, a lot less angry, though somewhat harder in some areas, still with a love of trading, and a desire to continually improve my ability to play the game.

Am I still a nutter? Of course?

Should I be trading,? meh, who knows I will do it anyway, I love it.

Could something like this happen to someone else?

Possibly... I think my background provides some special cases making me more prone to the collapse I expereinced than many...

Many Wise Heads have said that trading is as much a journey about learning who you are as it is about learning how to benefit from a market. I beleive this.

I like the journey.

And as a side note... I was part of a study group of 500+ people who entered the mental health system around the same time. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only one who has managed to wean off the anti-psychotic drugs, re-enter the workforce and resume a normal independant life.

I am a lucky man.

I can grow my trading account in markets that move up and down. I can pass on knowledge to others and help them grow as well. I keep the company of traders who trade for a living.

It's all good... but for a while there... I beleive I truly experienced a living hell and a waking nightmare, thanks to a rather foolish and non self aware approach to the markets, with a desire to be a trader without really knowing what a trader was or did.

I won't make that mistake again... there are far more interesting mistakes to make now, lol

;)