Evolution of a full time trader and their journey

#1
Hello everyone,

Starting a new thread after a long time. I am 32 and a software engineer. I have been trading part time since 2009. In 2009 Opened a demat account with Rs.5000 and started taking some positional trades randomly. Had some profit on initial days (pure luck). Also I started doing intraday trading without know what is intraday, square off, short sell (have asked lot of questions on traderji forum. Made some small loss on intraday also. I was following the smart portfolio hosted by business standard. Once of the fund manager bought PVP ventures and it took that trade blindly for the whole 5000 Rs. Bought it around Rs.51. Thats the end of my first trading account and I finally sold the share at Rs.5. Overall loss around Rs4500.

After few days somewhere in the internet I found that we can make money through forex trading. Next burnt my fingers in forex. That time I don't know what is technical analysis. Then I started reading technical analysis and started studying various indicators, trading strategy and got some picture on how the market moves or got some idea on trading. After so many years I settled with a trading system which works for me and I was thinking why can't we do fulltime trading.

I funded my trading account with 1 Lakh and started trading in nifty (1 Lot) during my office hours. I use to have my charting platform in VPS and connect remotely. I was following my trading system perfectly but still doing some experiments on the trading system. Instead of candlestick chart I moved to renko or rangebar charts. It din't workout well. All my initial profits gone after moving to renko and rangebar charts. Then I continued following candlestick chart. I could not concentrate on trading since I was struck in meeting or on travel. Thus I came to a conclusion that I could not trade when I was in office. So stopped with trading in nifty. But this time I got confident that I could do positional trade in live market.

Still I wanted to do some trading to earn some additional income. Next decided to do EOD analysis on nifty. Very first trade huge drawdown. Rs.5500 loss. Next trade Rs.5000 profit. Since I was doing EOD trades on nifty I got very less entry and this forced me take unnecessary trading decisions. So again stopped trading for a while.

Still I wanted to continue trading and this time I though why can't we do intraday trading. Watching charts after market hours and it looked very beautiful. Now decided to do only intraday trading for couple of hours before going to office. Tried some intraday trading. Everything looked perfect after market hours but when I sit during market hours I could act very fast and also could not make any analysis. My mind was getting freezed if I start doing trading on 1 min and 5 min chart. So made my mind to trade on stock futures using 15 mins TF. Again same problem. I want to make perfect entry as per my trading syatem but when my I get a signal from my trading system either there is no much volatility or nifty will reverse and eventually I will end up in loss. Also I found that I could not concentrate on more that 2 to 3 trades in parallel. Made around Rs.10000 loss on intraday.

After sometime I got felt Intraday is not for me and we need to do only positional trading on futures. Why futures? because it has around 200 scrips and we can get frequent trading setups on those 200 scrips as per EOD analysis. Got 2 short setup and went into the trade as per my EOD analysis. Again nifty gap up and these 2 short trades went to loss. This time I realized that stock trend is always influenced by nifty though its not in nifty 50. Also to trade on futures we need to have huge margin and its not possible to take continuous calls on future stocks.

After spending years in market, losing few thousands and paper trade, now realized I am not an intraday trader and not positional trader on stock futures, no options. I figured out that I can do positional trading on nifty futures in 30 mins and 1 hr chart. Next is money and risk management.

I joined lot of telegram channels and lot of analyst giving free calls (intraday and positional) which looks very profitable. I was feeling bad that why I am not able to succeed. Then realized that they were giving only calls and they are not actually trading those calls in their own account. Most of them give calls on public forum and conduct some crap paid webinars and seminars. One who gives trading calls and teaches the trading system, he himself not trading those calls and asks his students to take those trades and make some monthly report cards and projecting it in public forum. Before organizing some costly seminars they do some trading on the live trading account with very small amount and some how they double their account and boast in the group that they have made this much return using these trading strategies. Question arises in my mind. Why they are not trading actively? Why they are not trading with big amount? Why they are giving free calls and explaining the trading system in public? Some people sell calls (paid subscription), some will run telegram group and conduct paid webinars, some will make some tool and sell their product and share their personnel details to brokers and trying to make us to open demat account with them so that they get commission. Broker sending trading calls and sharing research report because they want to make people trade and earn brokerage. Most of the pepole who open a thread in any public forum as trading journal will have an intention to get some customers and run some paid advisory service. My head is spinning. Finally understood this trading world business. Please don't get cheated or don't think trading is very easy by looking these kind of fake peoples.

Now I realized most of the traders whom I am seeing in the public forum are fake. They only trade on whatsapp, telegram, facebook, blogs, etc.

Then found the Zerodha 60 day challenge winners. There were 5 traders in the 60 day challenge winners. This is the first time I came across real successful traders. I read all 5 threads and one thing I noticed was most of them have traded only in index (nifty and bank nifty). Out of 5 trades, 2 of them trades on Index futures, 2 of them trades on Index options and 1 trades on random stocks.

Now I followed these 2 trades who trade in Index futures. 1. Mr.Madan and 2. Mr.Pawan Arora.

I read the complete thread of Madan and it was the eye opener and gave lot of confidence where he shared about the trading psychology, money management, his day to day activities, why he is trading index. It was like reading 10 books in 1 days. Just couple of days back I found Madan in traderji and stared reading his thread and his blog.

Thanks to Madan Sir @madank for sharing his experience.

I have seen 2 types of full time traders,

1. Full time trader whose primary source of income is not from trading and may be born to some millionaire.

2. Full time trader whose primary source of income is only from trading.

Please be very careful in decided which trader to follow.

Now I am confident that I can make trading as living. I want to come to trading only if I lose my job though I am very much interested in trading since I am from normal middle class. Money is important for me. I don't care if it comes from my day job or trading. I realized that trading is not that easy and now i feel it is even more difficult than my day job. I want to become a full time trader at one point of time and there is long way to go..

Now I started working on to build my trading capital, Contingency fund, Fund for daily expense (atleast for 1 year). If I don't do this then I need to quit trading.

Those who think full time trading is better than day job, just see if you are clear on the below,

1. What type of trader you are? Intraday / Positional
2. What instrument you want to trade? Cash market / Stock Future / Index Future / Options / Currencies / Commodities.
3. Risk and money management.
4. Trading system which you are comfortable with.
5. Time management. (No Sick leaves , Casual leaves. Those who think trading is better than 9 to 5 job since currently market is opened only till 3.30 PM. What happens
if the market is extended till 11.55 PM?)
6. Controlling greed and fear.
7. Consistency (How long you can be successful with your trading system and money management?) Its not like deciding I am a full time trader after a bull market or a
bear market. To experience this how long you need to test your system. Backtest and forward test.

So anyone who is planning to go for full time trading, please work on these and then decide.

I request all full time traders to share their past experience and how you became full time trader and how is your current journey.

All traders are welcome to share their experience.
 
Last edited:

VJAY

Well-Known Member
#2
Dear srtrader,
Nice post with good experience in trading about do's & dont's ...This post really help who jumpin to this jungle....
 
#3
Hello everyone,

Starting a new thread after a long time. I am 32 and a software engineer. I have been trading part time since 2009. In 2009 Opened a demat account with Rs.5000 and started taking some positional trades randomly. Had some profit on initial days (pure luck). Also I started doing intraday trading without know what is intraday, square off, short sell (have asked lot of questions on traderji forum. Made some small loss on intraday also. I was following the smart portfolio hosted by business standard. Once of the fund manager bought PVP ventures and it took that trade blindly for the whole 5000 Rs. Bought it around Rs.51. Thats the end of my first trading account and I finally sold the share at Rs.5. Overall loss around Rs4500.

After few days somewhere in the internet I found that we can make money through forex trading. Next burnt my fingers in forex. That time I don't know what is technical analysis. Then I started reading technical analysis and started studying various indicators, trading strategy and got some picture on how the market moves or got some idea on trading. After so many years I settled with a trading system which works for me and I was thinking why can't we do fulltime trading.

I funded my trading account with 1 Lakh and started trading in nifty (1 Lot) during my office hours. I use to have my charting platform in VPS and connect remotely. I was following my trading system perfectly but still doing some experiments on the trading system. Instead of candlestick chart I moved to renko or rangebar charts. It din't workout well. All my initial profits gone after moving to renko and rangebar charts. Then I continued following candlestick chart. I could not concentrate on trading since I was struck in meeting or on travel. Thus I came to a conclusion that I could not trade when I was in office. So stopped with trading in nifty. But this time I got confident that I could do positional trade in live market.

Still I wanted to do some trading to earn some additional income. Next decided to do EOD analysis on nifty. Very first trade huge drawdown. Rs.5500 loss. Next trade Rs.5000 profit. Since I was doing EOD trades on nifty I got very less entry and this forced me take unnecessary trading decisions. So again stopped trading for a while.

Still I wanted to continue trading and this time I though why can't we do intraday trading. Watching charts after market hours and it looked very beautiful. Now decided to do only intraday trading for couple of hours before going to office. Tried some intraday trading. Everything looked perfect after market hours but when I sit during market hours I could act very fast and also could not make any analysis. My mind was getting freezed if I start doing trading on 1 min and 5 min chart. So made my mind to trade on stock futures using 15 mins TF. Again same problem. I want to make perfect entry as per my trading syatem but when my I get a signal from my trading system either there is no much volatility or nifty will reverse and eventually I will end up in loss. Also I found that I could not concentrate on more that 2 to 3 trades in parallel. Made around Rs.10000 loss on intraday.

After sometime I got felt Intraday is not for me and we need to do only positional trading on futures. Why futures? because it has around 200 scrips and we can get frequent trading setups on those 200 scrips as per EOD analysis. Got 2 short setup and went into the trade as per my EOD analysis. Again nifty gap up and these 2 short trades went to loss. This time I realized that stock trend is always influenced by nifty though its not in nifty 50. Also to trade on futures we need to have huge margin and its not possible to take continuous calls on future stocks.

After spending years in market, losing few thousands and paper trade, now realized I am not an intraday trader and not positional trader on stock futures, no options. I figured out that I can do positional trading on nifty futures in 30 mins and 1 hr chart. Next is money and risk management.

I joined lot of telegram channels and lot of analyst giving free calls (intraday and positional) which looks very profitable. I was feeling bad that why I am not able to succeed. Then realized that they were giving only calls and they are not actually trading those calls in their own account. Most of them give calls on public forum and conduct some crap paid webinars and seminars. One who gives trading calls and teaches the trading system, he himself not trading those calls and asks his students to take those trades and make some monthly report cards and projecting it in public forum. Before organizing some costly seminars they do some trading on the live trading account with very small amount and some how they double their account and boast in the group that they have made this much return using these trading strategies. Question arises in my mind. Why they are not trading actively? Why they are not trading with big amount? Why they are giving free calls and explaining the trading system in public? Some people sell calls (paid subscription), some will run telegram group and conduct paid webinars, some will make some tool and sell their product and share their personnel details to brokers and trying to make us to open demat account with them so that they get commission. Broker sending trading calls and sharing research report because they want to make people trade and earn brokerage. Most of the pepole who open a thread in any public forum as trading journal will have an intention to get some customers and run some paid advisory service. My head is spinning. Finally understood this trading world business. Please don't get cheated or don't think trading is very easy by looking these kind of fake peoples.

Now I realized most of the traders whom I am seeing in the public forum are fake. They only trade on whatsapp, telegram, facebook, blogs, etc.

Then found the Zerodha 60 day challenge winners. There were 5 traders in the 60 day challenge winners. This is the first time I came across real successful traders. I read all 5 threads and one thing I noticed was most of them have traded only in index (nifty and bank nifty). Out of 5 trades, 2 of them trades on Index futures, 2 of them trades on Index options and 1 trades on random stocks.

Now I followed these 2 trades who trade in Index futures. 1. Mr.Madan and 2. Mr.Pawan Arora.

I read the complete thread of Madan and it was the eye opener and gave lot of confidence where he shared about the trading psychology, money management, his day to day activities, why he is trading index. It was like reading 10 books in 1 days. Just couple of days back I found Madan in traderji and stared reading his thread and his blog.

Thanks to Madan Sir @madank for sharing his experience.

I have seen 2 types of full time traders,

1. Full time trader whose primary source of income is not from trading and may be born to some millionaire.

2. Full time trader whose primary source of income is only from trading.

Please be very careful in decided which trader to follow.

Now I am confident that I can make trading as living. I want to come to trading only if I lose my job though I am very much interested in trading since I am from normal middle class. Money is important for me. I don't care if it comes from my day job or trading. I realized that trading is not that easy and now i feel it is even more difficult than my day job. I want to become a full time trader at one point of time and there is long way to go..

Now I started working on to build my trading capital, Contingency fund, Fund for daily expense (atleast for 1 year). If I don't do this then I need to quit trading.

Those who think full time trading is better than day job, just see if you are clear on the below,

1. What type of trader you are? Intraday / Positional
2. What instrument you want to trade? Cash market / Stock Future / Index Future / Options / Currencies / Commodities.
3. Risk and money management.
4. Trading system which you are comfortable with.
5. Time management. (No Sick leaves , Casual leaves. Those who think trading is better than 9 to 5 job since currently market is opened only till 3.30 PM. What happens
if the market is extended till 11.55 PM?)
6. Controlling greed and fear.
7. Consistency (How long you can be successful with your trading system and money management?) Its not like deciding I am a full time trader after a bull market or a
bear market. To experience this how long you need to test your system. Backtest and forward test.

So anyone who is planning to go for full time trading, please work on these and then decide.

I request all full time traders to share their past experience and how you became full time trader and how is your current journey.

All traders are welcome to share their experience.

Lovely article, like every situation in life so it is in trading -- FIRST RECOGNIZE YOURSELF -- then realize that "TRADING IS A STATE OF BEING, NOT DOING" + TRADING IS LIKE MEDITATION, BE STILL, JUST OBSERVE THE CHART -- "ACT ONLY WHEN REQUIRED" a quote from Bill Williams, and another one " DANCING WITH THE MARKET IS MOVING WITH THE FLOW OF THE MARKET - UP, DOWN OR SIDEWAYS WITH A FEELING OF HARMONY, TRUST, GRATITUDE, AND YES, EVEN LOVE. !!!!!!!

I wonder how many traders enjoy the above while trading ?
Understand clearly that it is more about psychology - any half decent system / method will work if "MY MIND IS OK" !!

No matter what type of trader. intra day, swing. "investor" or what instrument one wants to trade -- phele apne aap ko pehchano !!
 

headstrong007

----- Full-Time ----- Day-Trader
#4
Full-time trading is more than difficult, it's like a profession of Sports.
U need 7-10 years of hard work, preparation, dedication and after that, there is no guarantee that you can succeed.
So, frankly speaking, don't expect much.
Try trading and learn slowly with other professions, you need
endurance and
very high passion for trading.

**************
Below Quotes from,
Trading Day by Day: Winning the Zero Sum Game of Futures Trading
by F. H. Chick Goslin (Author)
could be the eye-opener.

" Now think about this: Would you bet thousands of dollars a day you could beat the absolute best in the world in golf, tennis, boxing, chess, bridge, or poker? Would you try to make a living by going head-to-head against the best baseball, basketball, or football players in the world? Obviously you would not. Yet the truth is every time we make a trade in a futures market, or buy a share of stock, that is exactly what we are doing. Every time we make a trade, be it stocks or futures, we are competing against (among others) the very best traders in the world. "

____________

Nice points but you are wrong about 5th point. Successful traders trade according to their wish. They hardly watch market more than 4-5 hours. It's doesn't matter even if market open 24 hours.


Successful trading is better than 9 to 5 job. Its like I open my laptop in opening hours, trade for 1-2 hours and close he laptop. If I want I back at 2 pm to catch the last hour trade. I open the trading terminal in evening for another 2-3 hr window to catch the move in Crude.
Yes, I take the leave whenever I feel market lags momentum or I need refreshment to increase my concentration.
Trading is not like another job. It's like sports, you are competing with top performers, there is no level playing field.
You need extreme energy level. You need the frequent break, obviously. Otherwise, u'll be burned up quickly. Be careful.

Best Wishes to all who have the passion for trading and fighting only bcoz they love trading.
 
#5
A trader should try to mature himself as much as he can. You need a flexible mind to sync with the market trends. If you think you are rigid in your approach, then forex trading will kill you. Everyday is a new day in forex. You can't live in the past and gloat on your past 'success'.