New Year

Happy new year to you all! It took me a while to ease myself back into a trader's mindset (and a bit longer before I could muster up the focus for this post), but frankly I enjoyed the time away from the screens, and look forward to the coming trading year with fresh enthusiasm and optimism.

What's new besides the calendar turn? For starters, I will be shifting my focus from my personal account into a larger account of pooled funds. I've handled a mixed account before, and it's all coming from close family, so there won't be any external pressures on performance that typically comes from trading "opm". Instead, the biggest differences for me psychologically and strategically will come from having capital preservation as a priority over the maximization of gains. I will be using less leverage with each trade, but more importantly, I will also be executing far fewer trades than before. A major impetus for this change came from realizing that my short-term signals were more valuable in risk/reward as indicators for a time frame beyond intraday; thus I will be taking one step back in terms of market perspective, but still incorporating my prior system directly into my analysis/evaluation for longer-term entries.

So all in all, alot of changes that frankly will take some time and experimentation to grow comfortable with. But I've never been one to look before leaping, and I believe that direct real-time testing in the market is always the best (if not the most painless) way to craft and fine-tune one's trading ideas.