Just remember, start small. It's a lot harder than I make it...

Just remember, start small. It's a lot harder than I make it look. In a rising market it is probably better generally just to hold. It is one thing to see the opportunity, it is a whole other thing to act on it, and a whole other thing again to act on it quickly enough to capture the profit on the move. For example today there was a 4 cent gap between me trading out (well almost completely out) and trading back in. A holder would have captured that profit, I didn't. Likewise before today when I traded out the volumes were too small for me to move my entire reserve into and pout of it so the profit was less on that first movement than if I had held the full stock and ridden out the recent down turn. After the pennant break I moved almost everything back in, but it took a few cents to do that. Depending on what happens tomorrow that might still turn out to be a mistake.

Also it requires nerves of steel to not over-react to every movement, so you have to have a very calm disposition, or a fatalistic mindset, or a good sense of humour and the ability to laugh at yourself. Lastly, I get stuff wrong, and when I do it can cost 20k in the blink of an eye. While I was learning to do this I had days when I would lose 70k, and days when I would make that again. Now I aim to make a steady but smaller daily return and contain any losses - and admitting you got it wrong and exiting a trade can be surprisingly hard, just as hard as overcoming the fear of making the trade in the first place.

When the price is going down in a flag formation there is a period where you don't know whether you are looking at a flag or an inverse flag. By the time you know it can have cost you 15k and then another 5k just to exit if you panic, if you hold and stay calm to trade out on the upswing you might reduce that loss to 10k but it might also just drop if everyone starts panicking. When the wedge breaks you don't know for sure whether its just changing shape to become a flag (and continue down) or is a genuine break.

Where I have an advantage is in a volatile market, or when it turns, or even in a downwards market, precisely because I am always just a pattern away from exiting, so I contain loss at the price of giving up some of the gain, or in a volatile or steady channel market I can increase the profit through trades.

Where we stand now, though I and some others traded out because we believed we were turning to a retrace. That may still happen, but those that simply held on are as of today, only slightly worse off then those that traded out, and then traded back in, particularly if we exited too early.

After the collapse of 2018, I promised myself never to be in that situation again, so I learned to trade properly, rather than haphazardly as I had been doing. I had never been through that before. Even in 2008/9 my stocks were pretty much unaffected (or maybe it was because I had largely gone to cash before it anyway). Even though I traded out of GXY (by luck) at the top, I traded back in around $3.30 and that mistake cost me about 500k by the time I decided to stop getting beaten up by the falling price and started trading in an out as it fell while I slowly learned how to trade properly. I was lucky in that I had other stocks that made more than I lost during that time (thank you CSL) and kept me afloat. So trading is my solution to that scenario, but it was not at all easy in the beginning, and I look back to my first 10 to 15 years before that and realise now that I really had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I was just lucky. Which is why I trade like this now rather than just sit and hold: being lucky isn't enough, but I learned in the fire.

To anyone thinking of taking it up, I'd say, expect to lose money initially because seeing the opportunity is only one tiny bit of the learning needed. The hardest lesson is understanding yourself and what will make you freeze or panic when you should not, and understanding when you should.

Anyway that's my worthless opinion on the matter. Today I was right, tomorrow I could easily be wrong. If all goes wrong, there's always medical experiments for the kids as an option.