StrategyTrading1

About 30 years ago the company I was working for handed us checks - our retirement money, and told us we were on our own. We were told we could cash the checks and pay taxes, or roll the money over into a a tax deferred retirement investment of some sort. We were given information about the various options.

I began to study all about Mutual Funds. There were so very many to choose from. I decided that the best ones to invest in were probably those that had been doing well over the years. I found out that there were numerous Mutual Fund  newsletters that ranked and reviewed the various funds and fund families.

This was all new and very interesting to me, and I ended up subscribing to several newsletters, and sent my money off to a few funds including Fidelity, and my favorite at the time, the United Services Fund, a gold fund, then riding the wave of increasing precious metals prices. Eventually gold hit $800 per ounce and plunged, and that was the beginning of the end of United Services Fund.

I found out very quickly that, at least for me, Mutual Funds were just too boring. True, some moved up and down with certain market sectors, like today’s ETFs, and the United Services Fund, in particular, really moved quickly.

However, one could not trade them during the day. Money either had to be mailed or wired into the fund, and switches between funds within a family had to be made overnight. I discovered that this process was too slow and frustrating for me, and I learned that I didn’t like having someone else manage my money. If I was going to go through all the trouble of studying thousands of funds, I could just as well study the stocks that made up the funds.

I came to the conclusion that Mutual Funds were just not for me.

We all discover who we are and what we are made of when we enter the investing/trading arena. We all have a certain tolerance for risk, and an emotional “speed” that drives us. We all have a need to either be in control, or give up that control to someone or something else.

I discovered that I needed to make my own trading decisions. I needed to buy and sell individual stocks at any time during the trading day, and I needed to be in control of every aspect of that process.

There is a wide range of investing styles - as wide as there are people in the world. Some people go to a bank, and an investment advisor puts their entire life savings into some load fund, and these folks don’t have any idea what they are invested in. Every quarter a statement arrives, and when times are tough they don’t even look at it. Several decades later they have either made money or lost money, but this passive process suits them.

Others are frantic traders. The more volatile the instrument, the more they like the process.

We all have to discover who we are and what we can handle in the world of trading and investing. I discovered I was a trader.

What I needed to learn from that point forward, was just what kind of a trader I was, how much risk I could take, how much of my time I would devote to the process, how much loss I could take, how greedy or fearful I was and what I would learn from this wild ride through the blind curves of Wall Street.

As you may have discovered already, the ride never stops, the curves are sharp and bumps can be devastating, and you learn things about yourself that you would never have discovered had you not jumped into the fray and held on for dear life.