Beautiful Week/end

As the title suggests, this week has been nothing short of AWESOME!


This weekend I performed with the Millennial Choir and Orchestra, my maiden classical choir performance and I must say dat i really am missing performing a great classical piece with a bunch of great ppl :) Sang for all 4 svces but dat seemed too little! Hahaha! Thank God really :) The past weeks of listening to Handel's For Unto Us A Child Is Born day in and day out really paid off! It was absolutely duperbly fun :D

Standing in the front row on the Expo stage was like a first for me.. And it is a feeling i won't forget soon. Nervous for sure but yet exciting at the same time! I'm just wondering how many hundreds of thousands of people viewed those performances live and over the internet... Wow, when you put dat into perspective, you can't help but feel just what a blessing it was to have been there and done dat :) I am thankful for the experience.


Wanna say from the bottom of my heart dat it was such an honour, a privilege and a blessing to serve in a capacity like that with some of the greatest people there is :) Millennial Choir, I never thought it would be so fulfilling to perform like dat with u all, but you guys rock!!!!!!!!!! I am so impressed with how much we've improved in the course of one week! Well done you all!

And Sun was with us this weekend for svc! And, I got to shake her hand!!!!!! I have never gotten that up close to her before and for a moment i was like WOW I AM SHAKING SUN'S HAND.... AMAZING~ And guess what, her hand was like really soft to the touch! That was another surprise there because i've never shaken such a soft hand in a long long time! Hahaha! So yea wow, Sun really takes good care of herself :)


Haha~ Well this week also concludes the end of my UK paper trading account. This account was one of mixed feelings and such because I made 2 major mistakes which caused enough damage to my capital. Mistakes which i failed to curb at the very start and just let them continue. Yep, the most common (and most costly) mistake you can ever make in trading is this:

1. Not putting a stop loss on your trade, thereby exposing it to unlimited risk!

2. Putting a stop loss AND NOT HONOURING THAT STOP LOSS!

These are the 2 most common mistakes which any good trader should not be making but yet, human nature is as such. We hope for the best when obviously things are at a dead end, there is no hope left but to swallow the painful and bitter pill called "TRUTH". And that truth is that if you are holding on to a losing position.. CUT YOUR LOSSES IMMEDIATELY :) Protect your capital, stop trading, evaluate wat went wrong, LEARN FROM IT and live to trade another day. Better to lose a few thousands of dollars than to open up your entire capital to unlimited risk.


But nonetheless, I finally got my frame of mind back in sight and started hedging against my losing positions. My losing positions were going long (means I BUY Euros and sell the US Dollar) on the Euro when in the past week and more, the Dollar was strengthening like never before! So I hedged, I started buying Dollars instead and selling the Euros. And I slowly liquidated those losing positions bit by bit when there was a better price.

This last account happens to be my best record account yet. At one point in time the account was about 117% in profit, which means with a starting capital of £100k Brit pounds, I had made an extra £117k pounds, but about nearly half of those profits were lost when i cut my losses.

Slowly, I got a better hang of the market. I started the account on the 7th this month on a Monday and traded for 5 days right up till Friday the 11th. In those 5 days i had made only 2 losing trades of about 1K plus each and from there it was profit all the way and i made a lot of dough in those 5 days, the highest being about

£10,882.40 pounds in one single trade. In just 5 days I broke my personal best record when I made about £85K in profits.

Normally, I would make trades every single day but from the 14th right up to the 16th I didn't close a single trade because in that period was the time I was struggling over those 2 mistakes. Somewhere along the lines I made 2 bad moves and I spent 4 days hoping that the market would turn around in my favour.. Huge mistake.. I have never before witnessed first hand just how much the Dollar appreciated against the Euro in those 4 days.. I was stunned for a moment, but after shaking off that shock, I went into damage control mode with the hedging.

Looking back in hindsight it was easy to say how much better it would have been if i had cut my losses earlier. But then again, in hindsight things always seem better. You always tend to think of the "what ifs" and dat really messes up ur psychology. But I'm slowly but surely learning how to accept my losses better than the last :)

So anyway, damage control was a success. On the 17th and 18th (I was trading while at drama rehearsals whahah! Of cos, I knew what was going on and didn't skipped a beat during rehearsals~ Now dat's gd multi-tasking ;) ), I cut my losses gradually and freed up margin for my account.

In those 2 days, I managed to restore the account not only back to the 7th-11th period level of £85k, but I went on to make another £15k more to make the final profit of £200,079k. Could have gone on to make more but I told myself to commit to the goal of hitting that £200k mark and leaving it as it is :)

So in 2 weeks or rather 6 trading days to be exact, I made 100% profit on my 100K capital, my best ever result yet in almost 2 months of daily trading practice. Of cos, the money is virtual haha! But these results are a foreshadow of the near future to come :) If I can do this in virtual practice, I can surely duplicate similar results with real cash :)

I have a few conclusions with this latest trading experience:

1. I still make those mistakes which I don't wanna make. Dat means I haven't fully mastered my trading psychology :) No problem, the first step to overcoming that is to admit I still have a problem with it.  

2. I must learn to not be afraid of cutting losses sooner than later.

3. I must honour my stop losses. They are there for VERY GOOD REASON. Even though it means losing the trade, it is better to lose little than to lose much.

Below is the compilation of my profit and loss statements:

 

 

Well, finally I just wanna end this post with a verse from the Bible. This is the Rhema word confirmed with the Logos which God gave to me when I decided to embark on this 10,000 hour journey of learning to trade well.

NKJV Deuteronomy 8:18

"And you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day."

May I never forget the day when I become super rich, that I will remember it was all the work of God, that He made me rich so that I can establish His kingdom and purpose here on this earth :) Amen, glory to God :)

Greater things have yet to come, greater things still to be done in my trading experience. Till the next account!

My 10,000 Hour Project

Recently I mentioned in FB dat the Lord spoke to me and I would share about it soon :D

So finally, i've gotten a little bit of time to talk about it. Throughout this week, from since last Friday with Dr John Avanzini, right up till now with all the morning prayer meetings etc, it has been a really fruitful week.

I've started rehearsing with the drama team and the music is about almost done :) We will be so by the time the show is stated for tech runs. And, i've also been rehearsing with the Millennial Choir and Orchestra for next weekend's performance :D Really looking forward to that one cos i believe it's gonna be great.

Well anyway, what I wanted to share was something that God showed me during one morning in JW during morning pm. In one of those meetings, I had a vision of my life in the near future :D

I saw myself leading a team of ppl, very much like a cell group, a core bunch of ppl. These ppl were like me, they were traders! I've thought of being a cell leader before, but never really wanted to go into the cg ministry as it was. I know that i'll lead a group of ppl someday, but that morning, i think it became much clearer what kind of leader i will be. And this is wat i saw of those ppl:

We were a group of traders with one united goal in mind, that is to use our wealth to build the kingdom of God :) Each one of us had the finance and ability to move markets! I pictured all of us having families who wholly followed God's will for our lives and we were never in lack. Our children are brought up in the ways of the Lord, our wives are capable, beautiful, wise, the best helpers that any man can have. Our families were in order :)

I pictured ourselves coming together and making huge amounts of money. It was like anytime there was a need to build a school, a hospital etc etc, anytime the work of God needed financing, we were there to raise that amount of money and God made it come true for us! :D

So well, we have our medical fellowship, aircrew fellowship, business breakthru cg etc etc.. Hm why not a fellowship specially for TRADERS?? :D Dat should be really really interesting~


Yeap, that was the gist of it :D haha! This whole trading thing that I started on.. it has since become my 10,000 hour project. I started practicing in Oct till now. Honestly, from Mon to Fri, I spend an average of.. at least 12-15 hours reading financial reports, studying charts, learning about technical indicators, learning psychology etc etc. So mathematically speaking, I should become a pretty good trader within 2-3 years. Haha. But i think there's no way i can put a figure to this because the market is too dynamic and there is no way you can know everything about it in one lifetime. It has to be a CONSTANT ONGOING process of studying it. The day I think i've learnt it all, is the day i have failed.

It is my intention to keep on practicing and practicing and practicing. If you ask me when will I trade the real money? Honestly, I dun think i am there yet :)

Late Nov till early Dec was a really bad time for me. My state of mind was not exactly correct. There were many distractions, I could not focus, could not make sense of the market. I practiced on one account that lost more than 90% of my capital. Yea, made a whole host of mistakes.. BIG ONES. But dat's ok, I must not make those same mistakes again.

That account has since expired and during the last few days it was active, i was having technical problems with the loading of the website and I just couldn't trade for the last few days.. So I decided to set up another account, this time with the UK website instead.. So now instead of 100K SGD, I had 100K GBP instead.. quite a different ball game.

Took me a bit of getting used to trading in Brit pounds instead of Sing dollars.. This time I was determined not to make the same stupid mistakes. I spent a good amount of time monitoring the charts and market sentiment first, and then made some small trade amounts to 'test' whether my analysis was on the right track. Well, I lost a couple of thousand pounds in my first two trades but after that, I was getting a feel of the market sentiment. My confidence, shaken slightly from the past experience was slowly being restored. From there on, it was profit all the way. I started this account on the 7th of Dec which was a Monday, and so I traded for 5 trading days right up till Friday the 11th and below is the progress of the first week of my trading:

This is my best trading result yet :) Bettering even my last record of about $62k from $100k in two weeks. I've turned my $100k (Brit pounds) into a pretty good $185,800 plus in 5 days. So dat leaves me with another 5 more trading days before this account expires and I set up another practice account. Pray that I dun do anything stupid and lose all that has been accumulated in the last 5 days haha~

At the end of the day, it is NOT about trading to make money. It is really trading to TRADE WELL :) because if you cannot trade well, you will never make a single cent, but lose all you have invested. When you can make trades to an extent whereby you always max the profits and minimise the losses, you will eventually become a consistent profitable trader. And dat's the key, trading to trade well :)

The world's greatest sportsmen never became the greatest sportsmen because they were motivated by the money factor.. No. They became the best in their sport simply because they trained to do their sport WELL :) They trained to be the best sportsperson they can be. The money and sponsorships and endorsements and wat not were just by products of their standard of excellence in their quest to become the best. Trading is like that as well. Even though you deal with money on an ongoing basis, it should never be the motivating factor.

So, I wanna be the best online trader that I can be, that God wants me to be. And dat's exactly y I do wat i do :) I love wat i do, and it thrills me to know that this is the will God has for my life ;)