Thanks for the kind comments.
As I have mentioned in other posts, in my early twenties I used to play poker for a living. That was back in the late-nineties and early-noughties. Thanks to its growing popularity on television at the time, there were plenty of new people coming into the game which meant that the poker economy was growing fast. Then the internet came about and, with it, an online version of the game that everyone had been watching on television. The game’s popularity exploded both on and off line.
For already experienced players like myself, it was a glorious time to play live poker. Everyone and their neighbour started to fancy their chances at the tables. In reality, most of them were complete fish.
Inevitably, the fish eventually got tired of losing and the general level of ability started to increase rapidly. In short, the games became much harder to beat.
As Doyle Brunson famously says, poker is a hard way to make an easy living.
I eventually grew bored of playing so regularly.
I still play to this day but only occasionally. I usually stick to small and medium size tournaments rather than cash games these days. My favourite club is Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham where I can still occasionally be found trying my luck against a new generation of highly skilled players.
Anyways, about five or six years ago, I bumped into an old poker buddy. Like me, he had long since stopped playing poker regularly but he was gassed about this new thing he had found called Forex. At the time, I didn’t have a Scooby-Doo what that even was but his buzz and adrenaline for it piqued my interest.
I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to learning so naturally I started out reading as many books as I could, watched countless hours of YouTube and even tried my hand at a few demo accounts. I then opened a few spreadbetting accounts and tried my hand at live trading. The results weren’t good.
I lost a few hundred here and there and for a good while struggled to understand how to make money from the market. That frustrated me because, thanks to my years spent playing poker, I knew how things like probability, variance and risk management worked. I understood these principles on a deep level that most newbies couldn’t even aspire to comprehend.
Why couldn’t I win more than one or two trades in a row let alone turn a consistent profit? Was the whole thing a scam I wondered. Was anyone actually making money? Had my friend been exaggerating the amount he was making perhaps?
Then the penny finally dropped and, in a flash of insight and self-awareness, I instantly realised the problem: I had unwittingly become a victim of authority bias.
I had wrongly assumed that the people I was watching on YouTube ‘teaching’ me about trading must know more than me. To some extent that was perhaps true but only on a superficial level. Sure, they knew things I didn’t, which pairs are correlated, how certain indicators work and which economic data was most likely to affect the markets for example. However, looking back over some of their videos, it became obvious that some of them didn’t really understand the deeper more profound stuff like how probability really works, the role of variance in your results or how to actually manage risk in an optimal way. These were all skills that I had honed through years of playing poker.
I gave myself a Homer Simpson ‘Doh!’ and tried again. I still made mistakes but I was learning fast and making some nice withdrawals from time to time. However, I had no ambition to become a full-time trader.
Now in my mid-forties, I enjoy spending as much time as possible with my wife, doing the things we enjoy most, which are all either free or relatively inexpensive: Going to the gym, taking a walk along the beach or eating out at one of our local restaurants for example.
However, after a recent health issue, I was forced to reevaluate the importance of money so I decided to step my trading up a notch. It’s not only about the money, it’s about proving to myself that I am capable of producing extraordinary results in my life. Hence the reason for my small account challenge.
Up until this point I have only ever managed my own funds and made modest profits because trading has been little more than a hobby for me. I see it as a kind of puzzle that I like to solve from time to time.
However, that’s all about to change. I’m going all in!
Just yesterday, for example, I incorporated a company with the aim of increasing my own capital and managing several funded accounts.
I hope this answers your question.
Watch this space . . .