Scott's introduction

Hello, I'm Scott (Minnesota, USA). I'm retired. I'm here so I can track my progress and apply some methods as I try to squeeze some income out of my modest retirement account.

Hey Scott, good to see Minnesota on the map here! Retired, and the first thing you do is track your progress: I like that 🙂 I'm curious about the road that brought you here. How did you get into trading, and which method are you itching to put to the test first?

I was a technical writer who worked over 20 years mostly in the financial industry, documenting pieces of back office systems for Bear Stearns, Fiserv, JPMC, Broadridge, and Morgan Stanley, among others. I was also a casino craps player for awhile. (Did you know that the odds against rolling a 7 on the come-out roll is about 83%? I use that to decide if selling an option at a given strike and expiration is a reasonable risk.)

But the difference between craps and trading stocks and options is that a roll of the dice is a random event, whereas the pricing of an investment is not. Every trader looks for that non-random edge, and I'm looking for mine; something that's repeatable and risk managed. And I'm doing my best to avoid the dopamine hit of the big play. Repeatable and boring is what suits me.

I think Tradoshi could be the tool I need to be a consistent, boring trader. There aren't any good methods that make trading easy to document. And in pursuing a boring strategy, I really need meaningful performance measurement tools, so that I know when I'm making incremental progress even when it feels like I'm not. I'm hoping that Tradoshi will give me what I need.

Thanks for sharing all that, Scott. Twenty years writing documentation for Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley and the others... you must have a few stories to tell! 😅 I guess keeping a trading journal will feel pretty natural to you.

I really like what you said about avoiding the dopamine hit. Repeatable and boring is exactly how you keep emotions out of it. It took me a long time to accept that.

A bit about me: I'm Benjamin, I'm the one building Tradoshi. My swing trading is a boring routine too, about an hour a day. My swing trading strategy is backtested: over ten years it averages around 30% a year. I've been trading it live for six years now. But it's very uneven: in bear markets more like 2 or 3%, some years nothing, and a few years around 80%. That's just my own experience, not a promise for anyone. It's this routine I'm trying to automate with Swing Planner, you'll find it in the app. That unevenness from one year to the next is what pushed me toward day trading.

Day trading is different. I've been doing it for two years and I'm only just starting to find my edge. Building this journal helped me a lot with the psychology, which is a big part of it.

If you ever feel like sharing your strategies, there's a section for that: tradoshi.com/en/forum/method-and-strategy

Which broker do you use? I can help you import your history if you want.