Breaking Out Of The Comfort Zone

After intensively studying the precious material of the WarriorPro course and investing every minute of my free-time during each weekday night and focusing on it for entire week-end days I finally decided to make it happen. It was the end of March 2016 when I broke out of my comfort zone and made enough space in my life to focus on trading full-time by quitting my job. If you wish to go further in details about this decision-making process, please read my previous articles, something about me and the most difficult decision.

Today, instead, I’d like to focus on what comes next. In fact, as many of the chat-room members already know, I recently have taken the decision of switching the strategy I use to profit from the markets. Here is the “behind the scene” of this change. It all started when I noticed Ross embracing the challenge of growing a small account (starting from a balance of just around $580) on January 1^st 2017. He also continues to trade with a larger account at the same time. I still find it to be almost unbelievable and I’ve used it as a source of inspiration for myself!

So, when I started trading early last year, I found the application of his momentum strategy not working for me and the bad results that I had on May 2016 (when I was still trading in the simulator) convinced me to cut it out from my trading strategies due to poor results. At that time, though, I’ve made a promise to myself that I’d have given it another shot once I would have felt ready to. Now, that time has come.

Analyze The Cause Of Your Fears

In fact, after a deep analysis, I think the main reasons of failure to apply the momentum strategy with success were the following three:

Focusing on too many strategies at once (momo, VWAP, reversals);
Inexperience on working with hot-keys;
Inability to handle the emotions caused by very fast moving stock prices.

Now that I’ve spent much more time and experience on watching charts, the level 2 and I’ve gotten familiar with hotkeys, I feel that my ability to handle faster moves has increased dramatically. Moreover, the fact that I’ve already shown to myself that I can be successful at applying different strategies helped my level of self-confidence in what I can accomplish. Since I’m convinced that I can be good at this strategy too, I figured that I don’t want to waste this huge potential.

This time, though, I need to focus myself entirely on this strategy (at least during pre-market and for the first 2 hours after the market opens) and don’t get distracted trying to apply any other one. I think this issue was the primary cause of failure in the application of the momentum strategy in the first place.

My idea is to start with small size and measure my results at least for one full month. The idea is that I’ll be increasing the exposure only when the winning rate consistency will get solid. Then, I’ll let the statistics decide what to do next.

I wanted to inform all of you about this switch because inside the chat-room many of you have started knowing me because of the strategies you saw me applying since I became Junior Moderator. But, once I’d be more focused on trading the momentum strategy from now on, I believe I had to alert this amazing community and inform you about the details behind this choice.

I’m really excited for this new journey to start and I’ll keep you posted about my progress as this challenge unfolds, including every struggle and difficulty I’ll meet into this path to success. I really want to prove myself that I can master this one too.

See you in the chat room.

Trade safe,

Roberto Barbaro