Introduction (NEW!)

When I was in my early teens, the internet boom was just starting to heat up. CNBC was being shown on every corner, and stocks were shooting up. My father dove headlong into the stock craze of the time: at first to his glee, and later to his detriment. As we took a nice father/son vacation in California, I remember watching the ticker on CNBC scroll across, and him explaining how the amount of shares you owned would be how much money you gained if that stock went up a point. Wow! A fire started inside me as I became briefly fascinated with this seemingly easy money making scheme. I promptly made my first stock pick as the coolest ticker I ever saw went across the screen at light speed. I told my father to buy 10,000 shares of ATOM, as it was sure to go up a few points tomorrow. He wisely did not heed my advice, and I found out later that the world was just not ready yet for Atomic Burrito.

This early experience spurred me to start trading when I was 17 years old. I had some money from my grandmother, and wanted to make a buck. 17 year olds have notoriously short attention spans, and when the money was not rolling in 5 months later, I let trading go by the wayside and became interested in other things, mainly computer games and girls. I kept watch of the market, read a piece about it here and then, never letting that old interest completely lapse.

When I turned 20 years old, I was heavily into computer games. I thought that if only I could make enough money to live on, I could play computer games forever. I started looking at the market and noticing its parallels to some of the computer games I had been playing. Would it be possible to take what I had learned playing computer games, and apply it to the stock market? I decided in late October of my 20th year of life that I would get back into the stock market, and seriously this time.

It has been 3 years now since that 20th birthday. The experiences I have gone through trading having changed me profoundly, in more ways that I could ever hope to put down. I have lost money over and over again, been to hell and back with myself, and faced some of the most daunting challenges of this short life. My motivations for trading have changed, my attitude about myself has changed, and the wisdom that sparked so long ago has grown.

This blog is the culmination of many of my experiences. Here you will get my weekly updates on the markets, my daily updates on market internals via twitter and mytrade, and the wisdom I have paid for over the years. The content make up of this site will be around 90% market related, with the last 10% open to inspiration. If you have been following me for long on mytrade, then you know already that many of my weekly posts have nuggets of wisdom on the markets and life  in them.  Please feel free to send me an email with comments, complaints, or advice; I am always open to new ideas from readers.

Enjoy yourself

Love,

Lucas

Update 3/26/2010:

I am deciding to take another direction with this blog. I have been trading with a prop firm, Keystone Trading Group, since the end of Jan (2010) and I wanted to make this blog into my own personal accountability vehicle. See one thing I do enjoy is reading about other trader’s trades. The success of books like Market Wizards makes me confident that I am not the only one. So this blog is going to change from the twitter and weekly updates into a daily blog about my personal trading. Trading with Keystone has given me the tools to show graphically exactly what my trades were on the day. I have been communicating daily with the owner of KS on the things I learn, as well as posting nightly plans for the next day. I am going to be sharing these daily on this blog.

The motivation of this came from a few places, but is best described by Dr. Steenbarger’s recent book The Daily Trading Coach. On page 160, he describes how “You want to be visible, warts and all, because that will help you-emotionally-put those warts into perspective.”  He goes on to tell how he offered readers of his blog to join him in posting their trades on a daily basis.  Out of many people, only a limited number of them showed any interest.  He commented on this with a very powerful line that has stuck with me “That, dear read, is how losers react.”  No body wants to talk about their losers because they take them personally, however in reality, they mean nothing about you!  Successful traders can just as easily talk about their wins as their losers because their self value is never on the line.

So If you like watching other traders, seeing their failures and successes, then you will like this blog.  You will see all my day trading activities, the best and the worst.  The daily post may be long, but it will be segmented into sections that are easily navigable.  I hope you enjoy, and feel free to comment in whatever way you see fit, although follow the guidelines on the Site Rules.

Me and Mom in Mexico