Let me introduce myself.
My name is Jaime Valenzuela and I live in Southern California. I have been trading stocks since the late nineties with some success and a lot of luck!! I am not a great trader yet, but I am working very hard at it.
Trading has been my only source of income since 2005. I had a rough 2008 (as many people) in the market and barely squeaked a small gain by the end of the year. But then came 2009 and things got really weird for the first few months. It seemed like every trade I placed got stopped out on a gap and I began to rack up some losses. I had never experienced a draw down of that magnitude. Luckily I had already a limit to my weekly losses and had began to scale down my position sizes. But I had to figure out what I was doing wrong.
I stopped trading completely and set my goal to figure out how to fix it. Since I had been keeping a journal on composition books and scattered spread sheets, I began to look for clues and insight to my problem. The fact that the journal wasn’t structured and that notes and information was scattered made it difficult to study. Because I have some programming skills I wrote a journaling application and organized all the data in a database. I manually entered all the data from the notebooks and spread sheets as I organized it and then gave the application some basic search and graphing features.
Looking at the notes tought me a few things:
- I wasn’t writing very useful information.
- I didn’t really know how to plan for the trading day.
- Thank God for risk management and stops!
- I am my own worst enemy when it comes to trading.
Writing the journaling software and using it to plan, keep a diary and to study the markets put me back into a profitable path (sure the fact that the market has been rallying since helps too.) But I am truly trading better because I now have a structured routine.
This blog will be a place to share resources on journaling for traders as well as a few of my own entries that might help other traders.
