Hey @Cabbie :) Thanks for your tag of a few days ago. I've...

Hey @Cabbie
Thanks for your tag of a few days ago. I've stayed away for about the last month. My wife and I will be heading to Tassie in about 9 days for a two week visit, this time without the kids. We'll be doing some more scouting around for possible retirement locations. This time we'll be looking at areas south of Hobart; Bruny Island and the Tamar Valley.

2017 has been a trying one for me, trading-wise, and continues to be. I'm glad I'm not trying to DT in this environment. Hats off to those of you who are managing to do this successfully (meaning, you are actually making a profit in your trades with no BS make-believe posts on this thread).

After about 4 months of trading, our SMSF results look like this: the 33% we have with a small caps managed fund is slightly in profit; the 33% we have in a SMA with a broker we like is down about 5%; the 33% we are trading ourselves in the spec end of the market is down about 10%. We are both still working (at least for now), continuing to receive SG payments from our employers and our fund is in Accumulation mode, so we can continue to add to the Super but can't make any withdrawals yet (not that we want to).

My main wishlist has about 50 stocks. These are the ones I follow every day and which I think I understand the best. We currently hold 8 stocks and will be adding a new one - GMV - when it lists next week. We have only had two completed trades in the SMSF this year, both for a nice profit. The last stock added was WCN, which I managed to get for 0.6c after waiting in the queue for a few months.

So, what's it been like? Glad you asked
* I have stuck with my plan and not cheated. I have paid a lot of attention to entry prices and have been prepared to wait as long as it takes to get my order filled (or not) - please keep in mind that my time frame is up to 2 years, so hardly relevant to this thread (which is one reason I don't post much anymore).
* what looked like solid support hasn't turned out that way for some of my holdings (SYA, NSL and NAE). For most of my other trades the entry price seems to have held (AAJ, GTG, MTH, SSN). WCN has been rock-solid at 0.6c, so I'm pretty confident about that.
* None of my holdings, or the 50 or so which I watch closely, have had a run yet this year. A few have had some intraday action, but almost always have been sold off at the end of day/auction.
* Almost all the high-flyers/most talked-about/hyped stocks from late 2016 have tanked. Very few exceptions and very little in the way of commentary from the peeps who were leading the cheer squads back then. The blatant egotism (always from blokes) is another reason I don't post here much anymore. I have tried to learn from this by realizing that however amazing/ground-breaking etc the FA might seem to me, it means diddly-squat if the market doesn't agree. The result? I treat this entire "stock trading" process with a lot of humility: if I happen to be holding a stock which goes for a run, it's probably more due to luck than any great insight that I have. Do I really think I am as smart as the professionals who do this stuff for a living? Err, no. My main punt is that I might be one or two steps ahead of the main herd of retail buyers, so perhaps my odds of a successful trade are slightly better.
* I'm now trading parcel sizes which are an order of magnitude higher than anything I was doing before our SMSF was set up. I have usually been buying smaller parcels up to a maximum parcel size, based on a percentage of our entire portfolio. I allow myself to double down once, if I think it's useful. Movements of a few pips mean a lot of money to me, so I have had to get used to large changes in the value of our portfolio on a daily basis. This is getting easier with time.
* Given that I'm a much more passive trader now (I have a job and don't sit in front of a computer for 8-12 hours a day), I have tried to do as much thinking beforehand as possible. So, I've thought through how I will respond when a stock goes for a run/if one tanks etc. My long timeframe reduces the stress of trading, which is good for someone like me.

So, it's been challenging. My wife and I are both still glad that we did this. We have accepted a high level of risk, probably much higher than most peeps would be prepared to do with their retirement funds. We did our reading, made our choices, waited, then acted - all good. Now we watch. Having kept to our plan, it's now mainly psychological: realizing that the market isn't being favourable to us at present and having the discipline to not react.

The journey continues. All the very best to you guys and gals out there (and Dooley)