The beginning

First, I'm not a full time trader. I never went to school for finance, stock markets or economics.  I literally have zero professional training in this field.  Yet here I am, spending thousands of dollars trying to make it work.  Thousands of dollars daily, weekly, by the hour.  I make money then it all goes away. I struggle and borrow and move funds around.  It's frustrating, highly emotional and dragging me to the ends of my patience.

Something isn't working. Maybe if I start writing my thoughts and ideas down, something will click.  All I know is I can't keep going like this or there will be nothing left to work with.

Let me start with why I am trading at all.  It would seem strange that someone who has always been constantly employed, an expert with my skill set, making over 120k a year would want to do something else entirely different to make money.  Well it is crazy. But the bottom line is I hate what I do.  I'm a television video editor and I am good at it.  People love me doing it, but I cringe every time I think about starting a new gig or coming back into work the next day.  And let's face it, 120k outside of NYC for a family of 4 just doesn't cut it.  It's a constant feeling of inadequacy.  Working day in and day out only to continue to struggle.  Answering to bosses who have no clue what you do yet for some reason think they know best about everything you do.  Getting low balled for pay. Being told "there just isn't enough in the budget" to pay you what you should really be getting.  I am sick of it and I want to tell them all to go to hell.  But I can't because of that family of 4 with a mortgage I need to worry about.

In comes the stock market.  The magical stock market. Where a person can take some cash and turn it into a fortune with seemingly no effort.  But I am not that dumb and nieve.  I know that it can't be that easy and never thought it was going to be.  But how could I not even try?  It makes you money out of money.  So I jumped in.  I read books (not as many as I should have), followed industry twitter accounts like @traderflorida and @gtotoy. Read daily blogs from some big names like Joe Fahmy, Josh Brown, Brian Lund and others like Crossing Wall Street. I get an endless barrage of emails daily from Seeking Alpha.  I am on stocktwits and CNBC streams daily in the background (although I have learned to not listen.)  And I am trying.  It has been hard. It will get a lot harder. This is where I am going to write everything down and hopefully help sort out the problems, issues and noise.  

JLipkin