Last week my husband headed over to Arkansas to help Walmart with their 3D Visual Design Integration team. He will be one of a handful of designers who will help define the in-store experience for shoppers at Walmart and their other related chains. Although Larry has been primarily a graphic designer, he is well known in the mass-retail arena for his problem solving skills. This contract brings great relief to me and means that I can once again trade for the joy of it.
If you follow this blog, you know that I love to trade. However, this year has been rough. Trading became our only source of income last year when our graphic design firm’s clientele tightened up their budgets and cut our services. It was scary, but I did manage to generate enough profit each month to cover our expenses up until January of this year. That is when a brutal turn of events took place… I was stretched thin with a lot of open positions when a market reversal hit. It seems like I have been repeating the exact same scenario over and over all year. I will be in a series of solid trades, on the right side of the market movement, each within 1 day of closing the position with profit, then the market reverses. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, I will reverse my position so I can regain profits, only to have the market flip back over to the direction it was originally headed in!
I keep telling myself that the market isn’t out to get me, but some days it sure feels like it doesn’t like me.
In May, my account was full of bullish positions. Although the market had been overbought for months, it just continued to climb higher. I knew a pullback was coming at some point and when it finally did show up, I was in pretty good shape… for the first two weeks. Then the market continued to drop throughout expiration week and I had to buy back all of those bullish positions. This maneuver shot my account all to pieces. At this point I haven’t even attempted to repair those positions because I no longer have enough cash in my account to go back in and fix them all.
So here I am, just sitting out until I can see which direction the market is heading. My account is just too fragile to risk any more losses. These past few months I have been trading lighter, but I still had the pressure of our family’s financial obligations which needed to be met by pulling profits out of the market. It has been a real struggle and one that has left me virtually numb. Recently I had four positions which I had to buy back. The total impact on my account was a enough money to have covered our family bills for 3 months. I am basically at the point where I cannot lose any more of my capital, and I cannot afford to take any money away from my capital to pay the bills or I will not be able to dig out of this hole. No pressure, right?
Needless to say, this is not a good situation to be in. I find it hard to believe that anyone can trade like this and not have their emotions step in and screw up their trades. So my husband and I are extremely thankful for this contract with Walmart. It has been in the works for several weeks, and finally started last Tuesday.
I am simply amazed at the recent turn of events in our trading account. Two extremely bad months of trading, coupled with the need to pull money out of the account to cover our living expenses and taxes for last year, has decimated my trading account. We knew we were pushing our luck. Living exclusively off of our trading income while our account was still rather small was not the best plan, but we didn’t have another choice. So now that we have established another revenue string for awhile, I will cautiously repair my account and continue to grow it. That said, I also plan to start funneling more funds towards my Forex account since my success continues to compound in that area.
Just think, if you have a $2,000 account that you are day trading in, whether it be currencies, index futures, or commodity futures, and you make just 2% a day, each trading day, you will have a million dollar account in just over 13 months. That is the target for my Forex account. And once I achieve it, I intend to grow my options account up to the point where I can comfortably live on it again. However, this time I intend to have an account that is large enough to weather the rough trading times.
To end this post on a positive note, I would like to say that I did manage to increase my options trading account by 2.1% last week too!
Filed under: Trading | Tagged: cash, family, finance, Forex, market, options, stock market, taxes, Trading, women | 1 Comment »
Many of us have been waiting for this pullback since March. Now that it’s here, what’s next? Good Question…
Larry Cole
JorDonna Cole
