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Trading with a day job. Okay? Talk about one of the more arduous things that you might try to do in your life, especially if you’re trying to trade on short-term timeframes. This is very, very difficult because you’re putting yourself in an environment where your time is actually very, very limited. You could find yourself in a spot where you’re forcing things because I live in Los Angeles, opening bells at six 30 for the stock market. Cocoa opens at five o’clock in the morning. Man, that’s early. So you put yourself deliberately in harm’s way. When we talk about the goal for the trader is to have a system with which he or she is compatible, the compatibility is not just you psychologically and with your financial capital, but your environment, right? And your environment is that you’re working a nine to five job. Maybe you’re work from home.
I don’t have any judgment, but you have to think about how your attention is bifurcated. So you might find that trying to trade or scalp, it seems like, Hey, if I get up and start trading the pre-market at 6:00 AM local time, I got to be at my desk clocked in at nine o’clock. Latest. I’ve got three hours, and how many two minute intervals can I find in that three hours? Seems like there’s a lot of time. Well, there’s actually not, so you might be forcing things. That’s what I get from folks via email is that they can’t make it work, and I think it’s because they don’t know the plan coming into it. So they say, well, what am I going to do? I’m going to log into my machine to start looking at two minute bars, and for the love of God, when come hell or high water, I’m going to find something because I need to get that trade on. If I’m going to be a trader, I have to make these three hours work. Whereas you might know somebody else who’s skilled at intraday trading. It could be two minutes scalping, it could be several hours of holds day trading, whatever. It works. Some people are very, very good at it, but they don’t have the pressure that you have that you have to deliver at work. And so you can’t focus on the market at all.
And if you find yourself like, I’m just going to go peek. I’m going to go take a look and see if I could see anything. At that point, you’re really acting at a desperation, right? That’s not, again, I think would you hire yourself, if that’s what you define professional activity as, would you hire yourself if that’s what your trader was going to do, have their attention on something other than the market during trading hours, but peak in once in a while. So you have to hold yourself to a higher standard. That might mean you have to think about taking risk home overnight and being like a 1, 2, 3 day swing trader, maybe traded smaller. Maybe look at option debit positions with options so that your losses are minimized so that this way you’re not trying to rob Peter to pay Paul, right? Because your focus is a huge part of who you are as a trader, and if your focus is bifurcated and or your attention span, however you want to define it, to me, you’re starting out in a handicap situation because especially with the short end of it, meaning the shorter timeframes, man, you got to be at your desk focused laser in on the screens to see those opportunities.
Take advantage of your sense of timing and nail the trade for as long as you’re holding period is going to be right. So that’s the harsh reality of it, is that the compatibility part isn’t just you and your emotional constitution, your sense of emotional intelligence. Anything that goes in the chapter of trader psychology and your tactics, it has to deal with your environment. You see what I’m saying? So don’t set yourself up to lose. If you know that you’re handicapped, you see now, maybe you can check in during your lunch, but again, make sure that you have your plan. Like I talked about how I planned out my week, my preparation was a monster asset for me. Again, married up with my sense of optimism.
It’s not that I didn’t have fear, but I didn’t process the fear or losing that I was losing because as long as I followed my rules, I won the day, I did the best that I could for what I knew how to do at that moment in time. Always room for improvement. Absolutely, a hundred percent. Still to this day, I’m improving right now. Can’t you see? So keep in mind that your trading style, if you’re working a day job, you might have to tweak what it is, even though you might really want to. Did you ever go shopping for a certain suit, but it just didn’t look all that good on you? It looked really good on other guys, but you might be husky or you might be too short. So double breasted suit is not compatible with who you are at that moment in time.
Doesn’t mean you can’t get it and wear it, but you might want to figure out something that looks a little bit better. And so likewise, when you’re trying to trade with the day job, I really don’t know of too many people who are like, yeah, I’m going to try to do this and make it work with my professional career. It’s very, very difficult. And I know I did a video on when do you want to leave your job and become trading? We talked about how much money you would need to have. So this is kind of like the reality check is that you might have to try to have longer holding periods if you’re working a nine to five job, eight to four, it doesn’t matter what it is to me. I know I have viewers all around the world, so some of you are starting at night in Europe and all this and that. You want to also make sure that if that’s the case, you put a lot of pressure on your partner. If you have a family and be like, Hey, I got to start trading right in the middle of dinnertime. Make sure that you communicate that with your partner, that you’re going to be checked out. In many ways, I can share with you, there’s a lot of people and partners who have resentment over it. If you have a family, you’ve got to participate in the family on some level, and you can’t say, I’m trading. This is my time. You got to work that out ahead of time and make sure everyone’s on the same page because that situation in my experience, doesn’t get better. The resentments grow, the fights get bigger, right? So that’s what I’m saying. Environment has a lot to do with your trading, what you’re compatible with. It’s micro and macro.

The post Trading while working a day job first appeared on MartinKronicle.

The post Trading while working a day job appeared first on MartinKronicle.