Just when I thought my accountant wouldn't need to secretly smirk at me when filing my 2008 tax returns, I realised that my 8.1% ROI from my savings accounts, equities, and corporate bond portfolio was effectively mitigated by my losses in forex trading.
Granted, my 2008 forex losses were much less than my 2007 losses. I was pleasantly surprised that the losses weren't more. Yet, I sometimes still feel I'm not making enough progress quickly enough.
In the past, the thought of taking the easy route and giving up has occurred to me more than once.
Whilst I'm trading, my Dad's voice sometimes makes its way into my head: "When will you ever recover your losses in forex trading? You need to stop." Unfortunately, there was much worse of this kind of discouragement while I was growing up.
It sometimes surprises me how I was able to overcome all of this negativity and become relatively successful outside of my trading career. I attended a great university. I have a pretty good job with a pretty good salary and a pretty good boss. And I've got some good friends I can trust and count on. Even better is my enviable wardrobe full of enviable handbags and enviable Tiffany charms. Although I'm lacking an enviable boyfriend, I should know how fortunate I am because even without the enviable boyfriend, almost everything else seems so perfect.
And yet, when it comes to trading, my secretly smirking accountant or my secretly smirking Dad or my secretly smirking brokers are there right in the foreground.
So far, I haven't given up on trading. And just as it seemed the financial world was collapsing all around us, some bits of light and clarity were shining through to me as I discovered some key lessons on price action.
I started looking at the bid / ask prices and sizes on the highest volume stocks of the day, which helped me make better short-term trades.
In forex, I was looking at higher probability trade setups and only trading those.
Now, the fear is mainly gone from the market and yet it seems I've somehow frozen along with the sentiment shift.
I'm going to have to do better than this.
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