Changes for 2009

I celebrated my 42nd year as a human being a couple of months ago. The reading glasses are for effect, but I do need them every once in awhile. How did I get so old so fast?

The last two months have really sucked for my trading (down 2.73R in November and up only .10R in December). Given those paltry returns, you would think that now would be a very inopportune time to leave a secure job situation and attempt to trade for a living. You would think.

In three weeks that's what I'm planning to do. My wife and I are leaving our jobs (we work together--more on that in three weeks) of over 11 years to pursue new challenges and dreams. I would like to trade full time and (hopefully generate an income from trading), and my wife, Tricia, is planning to focus on home-schooling our kids (Go Tim Tebow!--he was a homeschooler as well).

My goal is to bring in 5R to 6R a month, which seemed easy a few months ago. Lately I haven't been as adept at pulling money out of the market, so needless to say, I'm a bit panicky about this new adventure.

We're going to give it 6 months to a year to see if we can make it work. If not, I'll go back to work. We live in Nebraska, so the cost of living is pretty cheap. We drive a 10-year-old minivan (pictured along with my house, two kids, and new tree) and we live a pretty conservative lifestyle. We'll have to cut way back on our world travel (I had to get new pages in my passport because I had too many visas).

I look forward to the new-found freedom that this next step in our lives will provide. People have told me that trading for a hobby and trading for a living are completely different. I'm sure they are.

But I feel prepared to weather the ups and downs of the market as I try to squeak out a measly salary each month. This blog will be a sort of journal for me to document the good times and the bad during the next year.

I hope to be able to post every day during the next year. I haven't had much time lately with all the changes that have been going on. Moving has been a process. I'm not sure how we accumulated so much stuff when we live in a 600 square foot apartment--to be fair, the apartment is attached to a 6,000 square foot house. When we moved in 11 years ago we moved all our belongings in the back of a station wagon in one trip.

For the immediate future, my focus will still be on day-trading. I love the simplicity of stock screening, and I'm sure that I'll continue to track screens over the next few years, but I think that I can limit my risk and create much larger returns by trading intra-day.

I will no longer be tracking stock screens along the side of the blog. It takes way too much time and my focus has shifted to a different style of trading.

Let me know if you would like me to continue to post my "R" values on the side as well.