R-I-S-K the new 4-letter word!!!!!

oh my golly gosh, was this past 10 days quite an eye-opening experience (AGAIN! You would think my eyes would be wide-open by this point in my life.....)

but that just goes to show, that when things are going well, we tend to think that they will continue.

i have been cautiously optimistic about my trading for the past 11 months, thinking maybe this time i had everything under control.

oops. one small crash in the chinese stock market and BOOM!

ok, so here is a great analogy i just read:

"We view financial risk much like popcorn popping in a microwave. Until the first kernel pops, one tends to believe nothing's happening," said Merrill Lynch chief investment strategist Richard Bernstein in Time magazine. "The initial pop seems like a random event until the second occurs. A third. A fourth. Then the popping goes wild." Suddenly, an unpredictable, irrational mob takes over.


wow was our popcorn popping last week!!!!!

my HP/C trade hit a low point of a 63% drawdown, far worse than i had experienced to this point. still a ways from a margin call but i sold out of 10% of my position at a loss to free up some margin in case things got worse.

they didnt, but neither have they gotten much better, either. i am still sitting on a significant drawdown and wondering when it might end. (and sometimes, i wonder IF it will end...)

i am super-annoyed with myself that I didnt stick to my original plan to divide my trading into different sub-accounts to trade different strategies. now i would go back to that plan, but i have to wait until i can get out of my HP/C with a profit (or maybe just less of a loss).

So I am very unhappy with my performance right now. even while i was saying things to friends like "i need more time to prove myself, i cannot consider myself successful with less than a year of trading...." - even while i was saying those things, i was feeling confident. not quite overconfident, but pretty darn close.

this has definitely shown me that i will need the full 2+ years longer to feel comfortable with my trading, that I can do it full-time and support myself and my family. i should not try to shorten the learning curve, i need to put in the time.

i can still reach my goal in the timeline i originally planned, but i am no longer dream of moving the date forward by any significant amount.