My first blog post!

My flight leaves in just 6 hours from Toronto and my first destination is Tokyo Japan. The flight is early in the morning so you can’t possibly expect me to sleep tonight. Since I still have a few things to do in preparation for my trip I’ll keep my first post brief.

I’m going to start the blog with a brief introduction about myself so you have an idea of who I am and how I got to this point.

After graduating with a B.Sc. in psychology (yes, psychology) I went to Asia to teach English like so many other lost graduates. I somehow ended up in Thailand and worked there for 18 months and it was the experience of a lifetime. Upon coming back I knew that I had to continue traveling because I felt there was so much to see and experience in this world and I wanted to do it while I was still young. So I looked for a field that would make that possible. How could I become a digital nomad? And that’s how I began trading prop…

It was June 2007, two months after returning to Canada and I was near broke. I had never thought about trading but I was put in contact with a proprietary firm through a friend. I put 2000 dollars down as a deposit at a Toronto firm which offered a 50% payout and 20 cents per 1000 shares commission (I am no longer there btw). I had never traded before so as a neophyte I thought it was going to be easy and I was going to get rich... boy band rich. I was soon proven wrong…

The atmosphere of a trading office was exciting as there were always guys screaming for stocks to go up or cursing a stock and calling it names that you would reserve for a cheating ex-girlfriend. I began by scalping thick stocks like F, S, and AMD and had made money the first 3 days of trading. I thought I was going to be a superstar! Soros 2.0? Unfortunately that would be the last 3 day winning streak I would have for months, lol. It certainly didn’t help that all of the other traders at my firm were struggling as well as they were not adjusting well to the new NYSE hybrid system. Having no part time job or savings I was able to keep myself afloat by playing poker both online and at the casino. It was something I had done throughout school and my travels to allow for a comfortable living. I would say that the skills which I acquired in poker have helped me greatly in trading (possibly more on that in a later post).

I quickly gravitated towards automated trading. I had been programming since I was 13 (but I wasn’t a nerd!) and in high school I had written automated email spamming software which made me a generous amount of money as a teenager. So automated trading it would be! From the get go I began back-testing strategies using a back-testing platform which I had written myself. Being the noob I was at the time I didn’t realize there were dozens of platforms already out there. I had tested everything under the sun. Moving averages, MACD, stochastics, RSI, CCI, moon phases, weather patterns, my biorhythms, you name it (alright, maybe not the last three). I always thought I had found something but it never seemed to work in real time because I had made the mistake that all newbies make: over-optimization!

It wasn’t until the start of 2008 that I was able to find something that worked on a consistent basis. Using Don Bright’s opening order strategy as a base, my manager and I developed a profitable variation of it. With the burden finally lifted off my shoulders and with new risk capital to use I began testing strategies in a new way: I ditched the idea of back-testing and focused on just throwing money at new ideas as I saw them. This was when my trading finally took off and the rest is history...

I’ve discovered and gone through many trading edges since them. Some last for months, some for only high volatility, and some are still going strong. I believe the most important trait a trader must have is the ability to adapt. The market is constantly changing so we as small time traders must change with it. Since I had my first profitable month I have not had a losing month, rarely a losing week and am currently on a 50+ day positive streak (knock on wood). I don’t say that to brag but I must tell you because I doubt many people would be interested in following my blog if you thought I was a loser! But as a trader I know my fortunes can and mostly likely will change so I won’t get ahead of myself…

Well I guess that’s it for an introduction and it’s much longer than I expected. I promise my future posts will be much shorter :) My next post will focus on the logistics of how I’ll be trading while on this trip. The setup, preparation, safeguards, and how I plan to hardly miss a day of trading.

Stay tuned and thanks for reading.