My Checkpoint

Two weeks of trading left in May, so far I'm doing pretty well. I'm following the "Primum non nocere" philosophy that medical school students are all too familiar with, that is "first, do no harm." The market is not making any real moves, the VIX is way down, no volume, which means the easy money is simply not there. What can you do, you learn to adapt. My first goal is not to take any major hits to my account b/c it'll be harder to come back in a slow month like this.

My down efficiency is well under control. I wasn't completely confident that I could hit the goal of having an up efficiency higher than down efficiency but to my surprise I'm actually accomplish that goal as well when Jane checked my stats for me, although not by that much. I haven't even came close to my loss limit for the day and I've been following my two strikes rule. I finally got my 2nd monitor installed after waiting for about 2 weeks... now I can have new tickers, rank reports, charts, and more tools I can utilize for trading.

Things are going well, but I'm not easing my foot off the gas and coasting. There are still times that I don't take on a trade b/c of the fear of losing money. I need to eventually get to the point where I trade without the emotion of fear present. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking about the variable cost, especially since I have the monitor to pay for now as well but I have not allowed it to affect me that much.

The CNBC thing is getting old after just one week. I don't really have a lot of time to focus on that, plus I'm not too excited about this week's prize. I should look into how they're executing the transactions and try to be more efficient from that.

I'm taking my Series 55 exam again this coming Friday. It is quite unpleasant having to deal w/ this nonsense again. There are things covered on the exam that's not even mentioned in the book or two different sources would have conflicting answers. It's really frustrating. Especially now that I'm going through the material the 2nd time I catch myself just glancing over the subjects instead of really study and understand it. I still got some time to prepare though, it's ok. After this whole 55 thing I gotta start on studying for the GMAT and maybe getting a motorcycle license. This gas price is killing me...

Apparently it's pretty easy to find my blog when people are searching for info about the company. A few rookies have mentioned that they read my blog when they were interviewing, including John. I find it somewhat amusing. I hope what I say here doesn't sway people one way or another. I pride myself on being a straight shooter and not sugar coat things yet still not be an asshole either. Obviously I hope to present the company and what I do in the most accurate yet favorable light. I don't think I'm giving away anything that's our trade secret here or anything bad/wrong/unethical... otherwise I'm sure management would've contacted me about it or straight up told me to take it down.

On a more personal level, I found that Jim Byrd is still with Dale Carnegie, he's the course instructor now, which is pretty cool. I've been thinking about coming aboard as a Graduate Assistant although I'm not too sure yet at the moment but I think it'll be a win-win situation. I could get a lot out of that plus it'd be great to work with Jim again. Maybe eventually I can become a full time trainer/consultant.

On a even more personal level... she's gone. She's really gone. I always had a feeling she was going to move away. She was drawn to that city the first time we were there and it has been calling her name ever since. I always wonder if we met at a different time, different place, maybe we'll have a different ending. It' s scary sometimes how similar our taste in music and movie is sometimes. We can debate the meaning of High Fidelity or know exactly what movie quote to insert into the conversation.