Countdown to Trading for a Living

My wife and I have four days left of our careers. February 2nd is when I go "live" and make a go of trading for our only income.

The last several weeks have been very busy as we've been preparing for this change. We've slowly been moving stuff out of our old house to our new one. We've been working on figuring out insurance (that stuff is expensive when you don't work for someone), transferring our retirement accounts (what's left of them), and preparing for bills (we haven't had a grocery, gas, electricity, phone, or water bill in 11 years).

I've tried to trade here and there during breaks in the day, but I haven't made much progress. The real test will come when I can devote the entire trading day to finding good setups and exploiting the "edges" that I focus on.

I need to earn about $250 per day to pay the bills and live comfortably. That seems very possible. A good trend day can bring in $3,000 to $5,000. I've got to control myself all the other days that don't trend or have good setups. I find myself often taking trades out of emotion, fear, or boredom and it's those trades that I need to control. One or two good days a month is all I need. I just need to be really careful on the other day to avoid losing what I've gained.

Today is a good example. I was up $400 on 3 trades and decided to take an "knee-jerk" trade that had no real setup. In 10 minutes I was down to $70 for the day. That's just dumb.

I hope everybody enjoys coming along for the ride. It should be interesting.

The neat thing is, if a geek like me can do this--anybody can. So wish me luck, and look for posts to start flowing on February 2nd.