I regularly take a taxi to work instead of the bus (mainly due to dread of having to go to work). I spend so much shopping.

In 2011 I have earned $38,480, of which $30,784 was take home pay. My expenses amounted to $20,051. *ashamed* In addition I also wasted $4K paying for a penalty for not exercising an option to purchase a house (worst impulse purchase ever).

So looking at the numbers above, it is apparent that the level of savings I have are abysmal.

It is interesting, however, to analyse where exactly my money went.

By category, my largest expenses went to the Vanity category, totalling a whooping $6.9K in a year. Here’s the breakdown:

I saw this coming but to see the actual amount was still quite surprising somehow. How on earth did I spend $2K on my skin, but still not see any visible improvement? Sigh. It’s one thing to spend extorbitantly and get results, it’s another to just throw money into the sea.

Also how did I spend $2K on clothes but still have nothing to wear? *shakes head* Finally I also spent $1K on hair but I still have shitty hair.

Evidently I need to stop believing that money will solve my problems.

Next, another interesting observation. There are 903 lines on my expense excel list but if I sort the items by amount, I find that 50% of my total expenditure came from the Top 74 items (8% of the total number of transactions!).

The takeaway? I need to stop counting pennies and focus on the pounds. Obviously my efforts to eat chicken rice instead of at an italian restaurant, do not make much of an impact on my overall expenditure.

Putting 2 and 2 together, basically I have spent most of my income on a select few items that did not improve my quality of living in a proportionate manner. I wouldn’t say they did not make any impact, but the impact it made did not justify the amount I spent.

Obviously I need to reallocate my resources and also relook at my decision making, since I am definitely not buying the right things that offer the results I am after.

Philips Futures sucked, period. Charging USD 2+ for each mini-lot was just daylight robbery.

What could have been winning positions, became losing ones. Each mini lot trade would leave me at least $6.00 in the red right off the entry point.

Not so peachy, it turned out. I lost $800 over the span of a short month. Along with my desire to trade. More than half of that was for trading costs I think. I don’t know; I couldn’t bear to count.

The glitchy slow platform with godawful spreads did not help one bit.

After some a lot of moping around, I did some research and switched to Oanda. It was a good decision. Thank the trading gods (and also the real God) I found this!!

Unfortunately while the platform bit has turned peachy, my trading skills still kinda sucked.

Fortunately though, I decided to downsize my positions and risk, and only lost $55 this time.

Today I tried out a new trading strategy which involves a lot of small trades, very short time frames, a small take profit, and a stop loss that is very, very far away, and lots of intense staring at the screen.

Risky? I guess. Scary? Well meh kinda. But results? 100% profit so far for the 14 trades today. It’s a 1.3% gain on my portfolio size (which is extremely tiny by the way).

I’m still a bit skeptical at this stage obviously – with it being a 1 day track record, so we’ll see how it goes, but I’m crossing my fingers!!!

I have been waiting for it, checking often to see if it has broken out.

Today I was on course (for my day job) the whole day, and I was so tired when I got home that I decided to take a nap at 8pm. As luck (or rather, gross misfortune) would have it, that hour was the hour of breakout.

I am so irritated now. There is still a chance that I just keep picking the false breakouts and miss the real ones… and what on earth can I do about that!?

Now I have hit my personal stop loss of 25% on account equity and will be paper trading for the next month or until I reach a steady profit pattern.

Bah, humbug.

I was pretty confused and a bit frustrated coz I didn’t know if I made the right choice. I was questioning whether my “strategy” (if we can even call it one) was valid. Or if there are some cases where exceptions should be made.

Can strategies still be called strategies if we allow exceptions?

My holy grail book by Ed Ponsi (again) says that even in the event of a consolidation, if the prevalent trend is still downwards, we should still reject long positions.

Right now I’m in sync with whatever strategy it is that is in my mind… and in a short position… despite the 100 pip price hike earlier, simply because the long term trend is downards.

Trying to convince myself that over a long period of time this will give me the benefit of probability.

OHMMMMM.

PS. Gotta stop myself from being so nervous every time I have an open position!!! >.<

For the past few hours, it was consolidating & broke out upwards. I was waiting for the breakout, and I identified the moment of breakout correctly.

But I remember a concept that was emphasized over and over again in Forex Patterns and Probabilities by Ed Ponsi, that we should never try to fight the trend and go into a long position when the market is spiralling downwards.

Keeping in mind this advice, I refrained and did not enter the market.

I’m now wondering whether my decision was right.

What if it was a short consolidation period & there was a siginificant breakout and I’m quite confident that it’s a true breakout? Should I still refrain?

In any case, I do not have the resources onto a “real” short position over the long-term downtrend. My loss tolerance simply isn’t enough to keep me in the market long enough to weather the volatility. I would have gotten stopped out 100 times over.

Does this mean that I should improvise and profit from short term scalping?

Then again, over a long term downtrend, the odds that I would profit from retracements are still lower…. and over a long period and large sample, this strategy will be harmful for my portfolio overall.

Meh… *chews fingers* Guess I’ll just wait for another chance to go short… or until the market changes into range-bound or consolidation or something….

Ohmmmm. Zen is me!

Summary of my 2 puny trades so far:

1, which I profited because I calculated my risk wrongly and bought 10 times the amount I should have. I exited upon realization.

2, which I exited because I thought I did calculations wrongly again when the unrealized profit reflected as 1368Y. Apparently 1368Y doesn’t translate into many dollars. Haaa.

A few hours ago, I entered my 3rd trade, a long USDJPY. Haven’t done my analysis for exiting and profit taking yet, so for now, the take-profit level is set at the previous M-top level.

Figuring out where to enter is difficult enough in itself, but I realize that figuring out where to exit is just as important. Too late, and you may give back all your unrealized gains. Too early, and you may miss the trend of a lifetime.

I managed to figure out the direction the market went for most trades, but just can’t seem to get the stop-loss and take-profit levels right.

But yesterday, I plucked up some courage, punched some numbers to control the risk, and executed my first real trade! For the record it was a long USD/SGD (patroitism ftw) of 5 mini lots (50,000). Hehe.

It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, which is a good thing since I have read that actual trading is supposed to feel completely different from paper trading.

Meh. Not so much.

However, it was frought with disaster.

Not in the sense that I lost money (I didn’t), but that an excel formula was wrong and I missed out a very important zero somewhere. My loss tolerance ended up at USD 1,000 instead of the planned USD 100.

I almost hyperventilated.

But thankfully, I managed to close the position with a SGD 165.00 gain. A 5.5% gain in one trade. Not too shabby I’d say! Wouldn’t attribute it to skill though.

My target profit now is USD 2,000 per month. The motivation behind this goal is that I will be able to quit my day job after I get married and look after my pets, and future kids at home.

I’ve been at my job now for almost 5 months, and I would say that I mostly love it. I get to leave work at 6pm every day, which really helps to keep my morale high! It’s such a luxury in today’s job market.

Anyway, here’s June’s expenditure summary:

It is significantly lower than March, but still above my target expenditure level of about $700. The drop is mainly caused by a reduction in Charity (bad), Pets, and Misc.

Transport is at a record high of $193 this month no thanks to my laziness of getting up earlier to catch the bus, resulting in having to take the taxi to work. Each trip is about $9. Pricey! This is money I really shouldn’t be spending!

But recently, after some deliberation, I have decided to venture into Forex trading. Have always been interested in the financial market. Initially intended to trade stocks, but settled on forex eventually cos of the:

• Leverage – Smaller capital compared to stocks
• Focus – Once I familiarize with a currency pair I can keep on trading it – stocks may suffer a fundamental dip & never recover, and I will have to learn the nature of a new stock all over again… and for stocks I also have to keep a portfolio, which is a lot of things to keep track of at a go.
• 24 hour trading – Flexi hours
• Volatile – Suitable for intraday trading, which means the scalability can provide me a good and stable income when I finally go full-time.

It will take me quite some time to accumulate the capital though. But it’s alright because I only want to really start when I have a firm footing of my techniques. In the meantime I gotta remember that every cent I spend now will be many dollars of compounded profit lost.

Ganbatte me!

This is what I spent in March. It’s a record high, for many categories.

Firstly, I’ve never spent so much on food before. Not sure if it was cos I felt too happy having a job, thus spending unnecessarily. My previous historical high was in the region of $180… this is almost double!

It’s also an unprecendented high for the ‘Pets’ category. Previously, my parents paid for all the pet food, medicine, etc for my pets… and as luck has it, the month I started working is also the same month that my pets ran out of food, and got tick infections. Bah. Nothing much I can do about this category though.

‘Beauty’ was also on the high side cos I bought a hair iron at the start of the month, and ran out of exfoliating gel & body moisturizer at the end of the month. I suppose I could have spent less by getting inexpensive options, like shopping at drugstores…

But I do really love the things that I bought. But yeah I gotta consider my spending power too…

As for the ‘Misc’ category, the main contributors are a camera lens I bought ($100), and a sub-category ‘Work’ ($127.30). Seriously I have no idea what the ‘Work’ part is about. I got a little bit excited about decorating my cubicle and went a tad overboard, I think.

Gah I really need some self control!! The month always ends with me regretting spending on certain things.