Testimonial

Hi guys,

I am doing this reluctantly but I promised Mojo (my trading friend & mentor from www.insanemoney.com) that I would write this post this morning since I've avoided it for 2 days. First of all, I need to acknowledge Mojo for having faith in me that trading can happen. Also, thanks for calling me out whenever I don't follow my rules! And most importantly, thank you for your level of integrity with teaching. Rock on dude! Oh and by the way, I just have to interject right here that chic traders DO ROCK! HAHA! I don't know what else it will take to prove you wrong!

Essentially what happened was on Monday around lunch time, I basically liquidated my entire account for a day's profit of around $81,900 (on a paper account that started from $1 million in January 2008. This was a 9.6% on my portfolio from last month that normally would take me 1-2 months to generate, and it happened within a matter of hours. I never thought that much could be made in a few hours! All this even happened after taking a beating through July/August in my account from the energy fall. On Friday, as I last posted under "What a Week" from Whiskeywoman, I wrote that I had legged out of most of my bullish positions to lock in profits. This ended very well for the day so I was not remotely worried come Monday morning when the market opened and the media was panicking the whole nation. On Monday morning, I was ready to start adding bullish positions back in if the market started to retrace upward-and it did. I was just staring at my account and watching the profits increase exponentially within a matter of hours that I thought to myself, "what could be the worst that could happen if I pull out of my account now?" The answer is NOTHING! What's wrong with taking profits and running in the middle of one of the best inefficiencies in the market like now?

The funniest thing about all this is all the articles put out by the media. My favorite one was yesterday's front page article on finance.yahoo.com titled "Angst returns to Wall Street: Stocks dive, oil soars." This just shows you how much fear is bred into the marketplace that's targeted at all the traders without rules and a system. They get eaten alive while the pros walk to the bank skipping and smiling!

The biggest lesson of all of this is not that I profited like crazy in one day...that doesn't teach much to a trader other than make him/her potentially extremely emotional if not careful. The real lesson was that after over a year of trading my butt off, I finally reached a point in emotional trading maturity that I was willing to completely pull out of the market, take profits, and take a step back and breathe instead of trying to chase the carrot and constantly telling myself that I could keep trying to go for max profit.

My biggest hesitation in writing this post on Monday when this happened was this...I thought to myself "well the people on the blog might not see this as any real profit since it's all on paper." This in itself is hard to write for me, but I promised Mojo that I would share everything-the good and the bad. Therefore, this post is dedicated to all the guys that are either beginning to trade or are still paper-trading with the goal to switch over to real money. Understand that over the past year of trading with Mojo and the IM gang, I have ALWAYS treated my paper account as though it was real money so I know that it will "manifest" into real money sooner than I can imagine. I guess you could say that this is the one area where I can add "feeling" to the pot. It FEELS real!

I am a true believer in miracles, even taking religion/faith aside. There really is a lot of power in your thoughts-good or bad. I did the Landmark Forum(thanks to Mojo) back in July 2006 and I watched "The Secret" about 1 1/2 years ago, and since then I have been focusing my mind on trading and eventually making it real one day. Well, I guess that day has come. So i am transitioning into real money now. So for any of you that think that you may never "get this stuff" or that it will take forever to trade real money, THINK AGAIN!

Stick with it, stick with your rules, find a good trading mentor and/or group and share your triumphs and struggles. Also, take criticism on your trading-don't fight it.

Happy trading everyone. Thanks for listening (reading this). Ciao!